When a spreadsheet is enough

A customer feedback analysis Excel template is the right tool when one person can read and tag the feedback each month, roughly up to a few thousand comments. It is transparent, cheap and teaches you what customers talk about. Beyond that volume, or across many locations and languages, tagging by hand becomes the bottleneck.

The four sheets

  1. Feedback: one row per review or comment, as collected.
  2. Topics: your list of themes and sub-themes, with definitions.
  3. Mentions: one row per topic mentioned in a review, with its sentiment.
  4. Summary: pivot tables and charts built from the Mentions sheet.

Sheet 1: Feedback

  • ID: a unique number for each review.
  • Date: the date of the review, not the date you collected it.
  • Source: Google Maps, Play Store, survey, email.
  • Location: store name or code.
  • Rating: if there is one.
  • Text: the full review.
  • Month: a formula from the date, such as =TEXT(B2,"yyyy-mm"), for grouping.

Sheet 2: Topics

List each theme and sub-theme in two columns, with a one-line definition. Turn the sub-theme column into a named range, for example TopicList. Using a fixed list is what keeps "Billing", "billing" and "Bill" from becoming three categories.

Choosing topics

How to categorise customer feedback.

How to categorise customer feedback

Sheet 3: Mentions

  • Review ID: links back to the Feedback sheet.
  • Topic: a drop-down using Data Validation with the TopicList range.
  • Sentiment: a drop-down of Positive, Negative, Neutral.
  • Quote: the words in the review that support this tag.
  • Lookup columns for Date, Month, Source and Location, pulled from the Feedback sheet with XLOOKUP on the Review ID.

A review that mentions three topics gets three rows. This is what keeps mixed reviews from losing one side.

Sheet 4: Summary

  • Pivot 1: rows Topic, columns Sentiment, values count of mentions. Add a calculated column for negative share: negative divided by the total of positive and negative.
  • Pivot 2: rows Topic, columns Month, filter Sentiment = Negative. This is your trend.
  • Pivot 3: rows Location, columns Topic, filter Sentiment = Negative, for the store view.
  • A change column: this month's negative share minus last month's, in percentage points.
  • A count column beside every share, so small samples are obvious.
Formula for negative share

If positive mentions are in column C and negative in D: =IFERROR(D2/(C2+D2),""). Leave neutral out of the denominator, or report it separately.

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A monthly routine

  1. Paste the month's new feedback into the Feedback sheet.
  2. Tag each new review in the Mentions sheet.
  3. Refresh the pivots.
  4. Write the three-sentence headline and the top issues for the report.
  5. Note any change to the topic list, with the date.
Report

A customer feedback analysis report template, with a sample.

A customer feedback analysis report template

When to move beyond Excel

  • Tagging takes more than a day a month.
  • You have more than a handful of locations to compare.
  • Feedback arrives in several languages.
  • Two people tag the same review differently and you cannot keep them consistent.
  • You need to go back and reclassify history after changing the topics.
AI

How to use AI to analyse customer reviews you can trust.

How to use ai to analyse customer reviews

Common questions

Can I use Google Sheets instead?

Yes. The same four sheets work; use data validation for drop-downs, XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP for the lookups, and pivot tables for the summary.

How many topics should the list have?

Start with eight to twelve sub-themes. Fewer hides problems; many more makes tagging slow and inconsistent.

Should I tag neutral mentions?

Tag them, but leave them out of the negative-share denominator, or report them separately, so a rise in neutral comments does not dilute a real change.

How do I handle reviews in other languages?

Tag the original text if you can read it, and add a translation column for colleagues. Keep the quote in the original language.

How do I keep two people consistent?

Write a one-line definition and two examples for every topic, and have both people tag the same 50 reviews once a quarter to compare.

Example rows

Feedback: 1042 | 2026-09-14 | Google Maps | Andheri West | 3 | "Lovely designs and helpful staff, but billing took 25 minutes."
One row in the Feedback sheet
Mentions: 1042 | Product > Range | Positive | "Lovely designs"; 1042 | Staff > Helpfulness | Positive | "helpful staff"; 1042 | Billing > Waiting time | Negative | "billing took 25 minutes"
The same review as three rows in the Mentions sheet

Doing this with Falcon

Falcon does this for your Google Maps and Google Play reviews. Every review is classified into themes, sub-themes and issues from your own taxonomy, with the sentiment of each mention; specific issues are found by clustering what customers wrote, each with a short summary; and every count opens the reviews behind it, with the supporting quote highlighted.