How to find and list top recurring terms in a Google Sheets column?

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1

I’m working on a project where I need to analyze tweets in my Google Sheets. I’ve got all the tweets in Column B, but now I’m stuck. What I want to do is figure out which words show up the most in these tweets. Is there a way to make Column D show a list of the most common words?

I tried looking for a built-in function, but I couldn’t find anything that does exactly what I need. It would be great if there was a formula that could count word frequency and then display the top results.

Here’s what I’m picturing:

  • Column B: Full of tweet text
  • Column D: Should show the most frequent words from those tweets

Has anyone done something like this before? Any tips or formulas would be super helpful. Thanks in advance for any ideas!

2

hey, i’ve done something similar before. u could try using SPLIT to break down the tweets, then COUNTIF to count word frequency. something like:

=QUERY(SPLIT(JOIN(" “,B:B),” "),“select Col1, count(Col1) group by Col1 order by count(Col1) desc limit 10”)

this should give u the top 10 words. might need some tweaking tho. good luck!

3

I’ve tackled this issue before in my data analysis work. One effective approach is using a combination of formulas. Start with =LOWER(REGEXREPLACE(B2:B, “[^a-zA-Z\s]”, “”)) to clean and standardize the text. Then use =SPLIT(TRANSPOSE(SPLIT(D2:D, " ")), “,”) to break it into individual words. Finally, =QUERY(E2:E, “SELECT E, COUNT(E) GROUP BY E ORDER BY COUNT(E) DESC LIMIT 20”) will give you the top 20 most frequent words.

You might need to adjust the LIMIT number and potentially add a filter for common words like ‘the’ or ‘and’. This method has worked well for me in similar projects, providing a clear view of the most recurring terms without much manual effort.

4

I encountered a similar challenge in one of my projects and found a method that worked well. You can break each tweet into individual words using the SPLIT function and then merge them into one column with FLATTEN. After that, you can count the occurrences of each word by applying QUERY and then use SORT to order the words by frequency. For instance, the formula

=QUERY(FLATTEN(SPLIT(B2:B, " ")), “SELECT Col1, COUNT(Col1) GROUP BY Col1 ORDER BY COUNT(Col1) DESC LIMIT 10”)

provides a good starting point. You might need to filter out common words or punctuation, but overall this approach should serve your needs.