The setup
To analyze reviews in Excel you need three sheets: Reviews (one row per review), Topics (your list of themes and sub-themes with definitions) and Mentions (one row per topic mentioned in a review, with sentiment and the supporting words).
A customer feedback analysis template in Excel.
A customer feedback analysis template in excelTagging
- Use Data Validation drop-downs from the Topics sheet so names stay consistent.
- Add a row in Mentions for each topic a review mentions.
- Pick sentiment from Positive, Negative, Neutral.
- Paste the few words that justify the tag.
Pivots
- Topic by sentiment: counts, then negative share as negative / (positive + negative).
- Topic by month, negative only: the trend.
- Location by topic, negative only: the store view.
- Always show the count beside the share.
A monthly routine
- Paste new reviews.
- Tag them.
- Refresh pivots.
- Write three headline sentences.
- Note any topic list changes.
Free review snapshot
Want this done for your own reviews?
No commitment. We use your details only to send your snapshot and follow up. Privacy policy
When to stop
- Tagging takes more than a day a month.
- You have more than a handful of locations to compare fairly.
- Reviews arrive in several languages.
- Two people tag differently and you cannot keep them aligned.
- You need to reclassify last year after changing categories.
- Managers want to click from a number to the reviews behind it.
An example
A café chain with six outlets tagged 400 reviews a month in Excel for a year. At 25 outlets and 2,000 reviews a month, tagging took a week, results arrived late and two analysts disagreed on categories. That was the point to move to a tool, carrying over the categories they had refined in Excel.
Common mistakes
- Free-text topic names.
- One row per review instead of per mention.
- No supporting quote.
- Never recording category changes.
Common questions
Can Excel formulas classify reviews?
Keyword formulas are brittle; tagging by hand is more reliable at small scale.
Google Sheets or Excel?
Either; the structure matters more.
How long does tagging take?
A careful person tags a few hundred reviews a day.
Is Excel good enough for leadership reports?
For small volumes, yes, if counts and quotes are included.
Checklist
- Three sheets set up.
- Drop-down topics.
- One row per mention.
- Pivots with counts beside shares.
- A monthly routine.
In short
Excel works well for small volumes if you tag mentions with a fixed topic list and build pivots for share and trend. Move on when tagging, locations, languages or consistency outgrow it.
Useful formulas
Negative share for a topic: =IFERROR(COUNTIFS(Topic,"Billing",Sentiment,"Negative")/(COUNTIFS(Topic,"Billing",Sentiment,"Negative")+COUNTIFS(Topic,"Billing",Sentiment,"Positive")),""). Month from a date: =TEXT(Date,"yyyy-mm"). Count of reviews behind a share: =COUNTIFS(Topic,"Billing",Sentiment,"<>Neutral").
Keep these in a separate Calculations sheet so they are easy to check and do not get overwritten when you paste new data.
Handing over to a tool
When you move on, take your topic list, definitions and examples with you. They are the most valuable output of the spreadsheet stage, and a good tool should let you start from them rather than from generic categories.
Keeping quality up
Once a month, ask a colleague to tag the same 50 reviews independently and compare. Where you disagree, tighten the topic definition and add an example. This small habit keeps a spreadsheet analysis honest and gives you the definitions any later tool will need.
Doing this with Falcon
Falcon builds the theme list from your own reviews, then labels every review against it with a multilingual model, scoring sentiment for each mention and keeping the exact quote behind each label. Texts too short to judge are marked unclear rather than guessed, and low-confidence labels are flagged for a person to check. Negative share by topic, location and month then shows what is rising where, with small samples flagged.