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A Word Cloud slide collects short text submissions from your audience and displays them as a live cloud — words submitted more frequently appear larger on screen. It’s perfect for quick temperature checks, warm-ups, and capturing group vocabulary.

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Creating a Word Cloud Slide

1

Add a new slide

Click the + button in the slide panel to insert a new slide into your presentation.
2

Select Word Cloud

Choose Word Cloud from the list of available slide types.
3

Type your question or prompt

Enter the prompt you want participants to respond to — for example, “Describe today’s workshop in one word” or “What comes to mind when you think of innovation?”
4

Configure settings

Adjust the settings (see below) to control how many submissions per person, whether to hide results, and whether to enable the profanity filter.
5

Present

Navigate to the slide during your presentation. Participants open the session link on their devices and start submitting words. The cloud updates live as each submission arrives.

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Word Cloud Settings

Control how many words each participant can submit — from 1 to 10 entries per person. Increase this for brainstorming sessions where you want more volume; keep it at 1 for focused, single-word responses.
Set a countdown timer in seconds. When the timer expires, submissions close automatically and the cloud locks in place. Leaving this off keeps submissions open until you manually close them.
Manually stop accepting new word entries at any point during the presentation by toggling Close Submissions. The cloud remains visible and you can continue discussing it.
Keep the word cloud hidden from the audience while submissions are coming in. When you’re ready to reveal, toggle off Hide Results and the full cloud appears at once — great for a dramatic reveal.
Allow the same participant to submit the same word more than once. This makes repeated words grow larger faster, which can be useful when you want to weight frequency more heavily.
Automatically block offensive or inappropriate words before they appear on screen. Recommended for public events, classrooms, and any session with an unknown audience.

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Smart Grouping

AhaSlides can automatically cluster similar words and synonyms so that semantically related submissions count toward the same visual group. Enable Smart Grouping in the slide settings panel before presenting. For example, words like “happy”, “happiness”, and “joyful” may be grouped under a single cluster, making the dominant themes in your audience’s responses easier to read at a glance. Smart Grouping is especially useful when participants use varied phrasing for the same underlying idea.

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Deleting Words Live

During presenting, hover over any word in the cloud and click the × icon to remove it immediately. The word disappears from the cloud in real time and does not reappear even if more submissions of the same word arrive after deletion. Use this to moderate inappropriate entries, remove off-topic words, or clean up the cloud before screenshotting it for a summary slide.

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Tips

Get the most out of your Word Cloud with these best practices:
  • Use it as an icebreaker opener — a word cloud at the start of a session signals interactivity immediately and gets everyone’s fingers on their phones early.
  • Combine with a follow-up Poll — after the cloud reveals the dominant themes, create a Poll that asks participants to vote on the top two or three words that appeared most.
  • Set a tight time limit (30–60 seconds) for focused responses — a short window encourages instinctive, honest answers rather than overthought ones.
  • Increase entries per participant for brainstorm sessions — allowing 5–10 submissions per person generates the volume needed to surface a genuinely useful idea landscape.
The Word Cloud counts as a Poll-type slide. The free plan allows up to 3 Poll-type slides per presentation at full 50-participant capacity. Poll and Open Ended slides also count toward this limit.