Video tutorial

Word Clouds from Askia on Vimeo.

Classic tutorial

The following example is based on this QES file.

General advice

In AskiaAnalyse, the Word Cloud menu is available under the "Analysis" -> "Dictionary" button of the top toolbar. Drag & drop the open question that you want to use from the left hand tree view into the "open ended question(s)" box.
In order to have a relevant word cloud, it is important to a decent number of words available from your open ended question. ~50 different words allow you to have a thick enough cloud. You can check all different words that have been used by the respondents in the "Dictionary" box. 

Refining the word list

The first thing to do is to filter out words that have no contextual meaning. "the", "of", "in", "to"...etc are words that you typically want to exclude from the open-ended analysis.

Highlight all these words in the "Dictionary" box (hold the ctrl key, then click them all), then right click on one of the highlighted words and select "Exclude"->"Temporarily". You also have the possibility to store this list of words for future open ended analysis. To do so, click the "Exclude..." button here:

Then click then "Ins" insert button on the right to create a new global exclusion library for (a) specific language(s). It takes the form of a .txt file that you'll then be able to modify.

Select the "Temporary" exclusion library and click the Right arrow. This will store it into your global exclusion settings.

In the exact same fashion, you can create groups of words that refer to the same idea, or simply carry common typographic errors. A global group called "beautiful" could group words like "beautiful", "beauty" and "pretty". The world cloud will then only display the group name.

Visual

Once your list of words is refined, you can click the "Cloud" button here . . .

A Random word cloud is going to be generated on the go, according to the "template properties" that you selected. By default, words that appear the most often will show bigger, and at the centre of the cloud.

To customize this, right click next to the result and select "Template properties". The "Canvas" set of properties refer to the global image properties. Play with these parameters if you want to change the size of your cloud, or its spread. The "Font" properties refer to individual words : their size, or the amount of words the should be displayed vertically. The "Colours" menu lets you add "Series" of colours for the words. 

Contour image

This setting allows your cloud to take the shape and colour of an image of your choice. (.bitmap, .jpeg or .gif). The image size will need to be about the same proportion as your Canvas' , and you'll need to have enough different words to fill up the shape. In the example below, there are not enough words to fill up the rectangular shape of my contour image.

So I can either reduce the size of the canvas, or increase the size of the words that fill it.

You can then export your result by right clicking on the image and selecting "Save as".