Word clouds are great visualizations for finding words that are most referenced in books, publications, and social media. This section will cover creating a word cloud in Tableau using BigQuery public data.

The first few steps are the same as in the preceding example:

1. After opening Tableau Desktop, select Google BigQuery under the Connect To a Server section on the left; then enter your login credentials for BigQuery.
2. At this point, all the tables in your dataset should be displayed on the left.

3. Click where it says New Custom SQL and enter the following query in the dialog:

SELECT word, SUM(word_count) word_count
FROM `bigquery-public-data.samples.shakespeare`
GROUP BY word
ORDER BY word_count desc

The dataset is from the works of William Shakespeare. The query returns a list of all words in his works, along with a count of the times each word appears in one of his works.

4. At the bottom, click on the tab titled Sheet 1 to enter the worksheet view. 
5. In the dimensions section, drag and drop the word dimension into the text tab in the marks section.
6. In the dimensions section, drag and drop the word_count measure to the size tab in the marks section.
7. There will be two tabs used in the marks section. Right-click on the size tab labeled word and select Measure | Count:

This will create what is called a tree map. In this example, there are far too many words in the list to utilize the visualization.

8. Drag and drop the word_count measure from the measures section to the filters section. When prompted with How do you want to filter on word_count, select Sum and click on next.
9. Select At Least for your condition and type 2000 in the dialog. Click on OK. This will return only those words that have a word count of at least 2,000.
10. Use the dropdown in the marks card to select Text:

11. Drag and drop the word_count measure from the measures section to the color tab in the marks section. This will color each word based on the count for that word:

You should be left with a color-coded word cloud.

Other charts can now be created as individual worksheet tabs. Tabs can then be combined to make what Tableau calls a dashboard. The process of creating a dashboard here is a bit more cumbersome than creating a dashboard in Google Data Studio, but Tableau offers a great deal of more customization for its dashboards. This, coupled with all the other features it offers, makes Tableau a much more attractive option, especially for enterprise users.