I’m working with a Google Sheets document where I have social media posts stored in column C. I need to create a formula that can analyze all the text in that column and show me which words appear most often.
Basically, I want to:
Take all the text from column C (contains various social media posts)
Count how many times each word appears across all rows
Display the most frequently used words in column E
Is there a built-in Google Sheets formula or combination of functions that can handle this kind of word frequency analysis? I’ve tried using COUNTIF but I’m not sure how to apply it to individual words within cells rather than entire cell contents.
Any suggestions on how to approach this problem would be really helpful. Thanks in advance!
just use the query() function with some regex cleanup. try =QUERY(SPLIT(REGEXREPLACE(TEXTJOIN(" “,TRUE,C:C),”[^a-zA-Z ]“,”“),” "),“select Col1, count(Col1) group by Col1 order by count(Col1) desc”) - works well for basic word counting and keeps things clean.
Had this exact problem last month with my content analysis project. Google Sheets can’t handle text parsing like this well, but there’s a solid workaround using Google Apps Script instead of formulas. Write a custom function that loops through column C, splits each cell into words, then counts frequency. The script auto-populates column E and updates when you run it. Takes 10 minutes if you know basic JavaScript. Way more reliable than chaining array formulas that timeout on big datasets. Plus Apps Script lets you filter stop words and handle punctuation properly - stuff that’s a pain with regular formulas.
I did something similar recently. Google Sheets lacks a direct function for word frequency analysis without major workarounds. Here’s what worked for me: I created a helper column and used REGEXREPLACE to remove punctuation, then applied ARRAYFORMULA with SPLIT to separate everything into individual words. I manually listed my target words in column E and utilized SUMPRODUCT with COUNTIF to count them across the split text. However, Google Sheets tends to struggle with large datasets using this method, so I ended up exporting to CSV and processing the data with a Python script for cleaner results that handled thousands of posts without crashing.
Google Sheets formulas are a pain for word frequency analysis. You’d need SPLIT, FLATTEN, UNIQUE, and COUNTIF functions all mashed together - it gets complex fast and crawls with large datasets.
I hit this same wall analyzing customer feedback. Tried formulas first but they were a nightmare to maintain and constantly broke.
Automation fixed everything for me. Built a workflow that pulls data from Sheets, processes text to extract and count words, then pushes results back to column E automatically.
Runs every time new data comes in, so word frequency stays current. No more fighting complex formulas that break when your data structure changes.
The automation handles removing common words (the, and, or), cleaning punctuation, and sorting by frequency. Way cleaner than spreadsheet functions.
Latenode makes building these workflows super easy without coding. Check it out: https://latenode.com
google sheets is kinda tricky for word counts. u can use split() and unique() to get the job done, but it’s not friendly lol. try =SPLIT(TEXTJOIN(" “,TRUE,C:C),” ") to break it up, then count using countif. otherwise, maybe switch to excel for easier pivot tables?