Word Cloud 2.0.0 giving the wrong values

[FrankvanDorp]

See the screenshot belowe for reference.

I'm using the Word Cloud custom visual, version 2.0.0, to generate word clouds from text fields. However, the values are wrong. The table below has ten values and the word "snake" appears 7 times, 5 times as "snake" and 2 times as part of "rattle snake".

However, when mousing over the word "snake" in the word cloud, it only gives a value of 2, not 7. Apparently, instead of counting the number of times the word occurs in the column, it only counts the different unique entries in the column, so it counts it once for "snake" and once for "rattle snake".

I obviously want the word cloud to just give me the total number the word snake appears, which is 7. Is there a way to get the word cloud to stop removing duplicates and just count the total number of times the word occurs?

[FrankvanDorp]

I'm still looking for a way to fix this, can anyone help me out?

[SRanger · Accepted solution]

New to Power BI and had the same issue as you.  The way I fixed it was by creating a field (I just named it WordCloud but you could name it anything) with the value of 1 for every record (did it with the create new column option in Power BI).  I then put this in the "Values" field as you can see in the picture below and bingo it now work how I'd expect it to work.

[FrankvanDorp]

That is a great workaround, thanks!

[Greg_Deckler]

@FrankvanDorp It's likely an artifact of how Power BI presents data to external visuals. You get the same thing with R and Python visuals because Power BI "helpfully" deduplicates the data (passes only distinct values). Which, of course, is not really helpful at all because it's just munged your data without asking and now that data is pretty much useless for things like Word Clouds and most other things.

[FrankvanDorp]

@Greg_Deckler I only now noticed I forgot to @ you in my reply. Apologies. But is there a way to stop PowerBI from automatically removing these duplicates?

[FrankvanDorp]

Thank you for the explanation of what goes wrong, but is there a way to fix it? Can I maybe fool PowerBI in some way that it doesn't pass only distinct values?