Text analytics using excel

[cacos]

Hi everyone. I'm using excel to collect opinions and I was thinking if there was something with the ability to do sentiment analysis built for excel, to identify positive/negative/neutral.


I've checked and found some online services but they all charge for this service. Did anyone face this challenge before and maybe could point me in the right direction?


Thanks a lot!


EDIT: Deleted duplicate topic (SirJB7)

 

[SirJB7]

Hi, cacos!

As far as I know computers hardware and software have no sentiments...

Regards!

PS: And there're people who say that those who use programs that deal with numbers are less sensitive than those who use words related software... so move on from Excel to Word right now!

 

[NARAYANK991]

Hi ,


I think just giving a topic name such as sentiment analysis will not tell those who are not acquainted with this area , anything much.


Excel finally has to have data , either numeric or text , to deal with.


Can you say what kind of data you have , posting some sample here , and then give the result that you want ?


Narayan

 

[Hui]

Cacos


I believe that these type of programs search through your text and look for a table of words which define "Sentiment", "Political aversion", Religeous Bent", "Climate Change Skeptisism" etc


You could make up a list of keywords and then do a Number count against the list and then compare counts etc

 

[cacos]

Hi Hui yes I was thinking on doing something of the sort, making the most out of the text functions. It's going to be a great challenge

 

[keymaster]

Cacos... you can do basic sentiment analysis very easily with Excel. I have done it several times (you can see example in this page - http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/07/19/analyzing-20000-comments/ )


The approach I suggest is (as Hui mentioned),


- list all words & synonyms of the sentiment you want to capture in a table. If you want to analyze multiple sentiments, arrange them like a matrix. See this example.

[pre]

Sentiments:
Happy    Sad
love     hate
like     bad
wow      no
hug      away
kiss     cant
smile    dont
laugh
enjoy
good
excellent
better[/pre]

- Then assign sentiment score for each line of text by looking up how many words or a sentiment are found in the text. A simple test is to use COUNTIF formula like =COUNTIF(text cell, "*love*")>0

would return TRUE if the text contains LOVE and FALSE otherwise.


- If you want, you can assign weights to words & count the total score

- Sort the list to see lines of text with highest sentiment score.


Improve the model slowly by adding more.

 

[cacos]

I just saw the article and it's great, I'm planning on following that approach, counting groups of words that represent the sentiments and are associated with the concepts I'm looking to analyze.


Thanks a lot Chandoo and everyone.

 

[Hoi-Yant]

Hey Cacos,


This might be a little late, but if you're still looking to do text and sentiment analysis on Excel, there's this company called Semantria that provides a free sentiment analysis Excel add-in.


The service isn't *free* per se, registration is free, you get 10 000 free credits to spend upon registering, and the add-in itself is also free, but after the 10 000 credits, you have to buy more.


If you're not looking to process a whole lot of documents, then this could definitely be worth your while!