How to Create a Sentiment Trend Chart in Excel

Tracking customer sentiment is more than just a passing curiosity, it's a crucial measure of your brand's health. A sentiment trend chart transforms raw feedback into a clear, visual story, showing you precisely when customer feelings shift and why. This article will guide you, step-by-step, through creating your own sentiment trend chart using a tool you already have: Microsoft Excel.

What Exactly is a Sentiment Trend Chart?

A sentiment trend chart visualizes how feelings about your brand, product, or service change over time. By categorizing customer comments, reviews, or social media mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, you can plot this data on a timeline. This allows you to move beyond individual comments and see the bigger picture.

For example, a sentiment chart can help you answer critical business questions like:

• Did our latest product update improve customer satisfaction or cause new frustrations?
• How did our recent marketing campaign affect brand perception on social media?
• Are our customer support efforts effectively reducing negative feedback over time?

Instead of relying on gut feelings, you can use this chart to connect specific events - like a feature launch or a price change - to a direct and measurable impact on customer sentiment.

Step 1: Gather and Prepare Your Feedback Data

Before you can build a chart, you need raw data. Your sentiment data can come from a variety of sources where customers share their opinions.

Common Data Sources:

• Surveys: Feedback from tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform.
• Product Reviews: Scraped reviews from your e-commerce site (Shopify, Amazon) or a review platform (G2, Capterra).
• Support Tickets: Transcripts or summaries from your helpdesk software (Zendesk, HubSpot Service Hub).
• Social Media: Mentions or comments scraped from platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook Brand Pages.

Regardless of the source, your goal is to organize this data into a simple Excel table. For this process to work, you need at least two columns: one for the date of the feedback and another for the feedback text itself. Your initial table should look something like this: