Tag Cloud
A Tag Cloud in Salesforce is a Salesforce Classic display element that shows a user's personal and public tags sized by how often each one is used.
Definition
A Tag Cloud in Salesforce is a Salesforce Classic display element that shows a user's personal and public tags sized by how often each one is used. The tags that appear most frequently render in a larger font, so a glance at the cloud tells you which labels carry the most records. It surfaces on the Tags page and, when an admin adds it, in the Classic sidebar.
This is a user-interface feature of Salesforce Classic tagging, not a cloud-computing product or a separate edition. It is a legacy capability. The tag cloud and the broader Tag Manager interface live only in Salesforce Classic, and newer orgs lean on Topics, list views, and global search for the same find-by-theme need.
How the weighted tag display works in Classic
Tags, the data behind the cloud
A tag is a word or short phrase you attach to a record to describe and group it in your own way. Salesforce supports two kinds. Personal tags are private, so only you see the ones you create. Public tags are visible to everyone in the org once an admin turns the feature on. A tag can hold letters, numbers, spaces, dashes, and underscores, and it must contain at least one letter or number. You add tags from the tag section at the top of a record detail page by typing comma-separated lists into the Personal Tags and Public Tags boxes. As you type, Salesforce suggests matching tags that already exist so you reuse a label instead of spawning a near-duplicate. The tag cloud is simply a weighted picture of this underlying tag data. Each distinct tag becomes a clickable word, and its font size reflects how many records carry it. A label on two records looks small. A label on two hundred records looks large. That sizing is the whole point: it turns a flat list of tags into a quick visual ranking of which themes you have used the most across your accounts, contacts, opportunities, and other objects.
The Tags page and clicking through
The Tags page is where the cloud does its real work. You reach it by clicking any tag name on a detail page, or from a sidebar link if an admin added one. The page lets you view, browse, search, and find records by tag, and rename or remove tags you own. Checkboxes toggle between personal and public tags so you can focus on one set at a time. By default tags list alphabetically, but you can sort them by the number of tagged records or by most recently used, which mirrors the same weighting the cloud shows visually. Click a tag and Salesforce groups the matching records by object type. Pick a second tag and the view narrows, because only records that match every selected tag stay on screen. You can deselect a single tag or clear all of them to start fresh. Searching accepts a term of at least two characters and supports wildcards, and the most recent search result is kept in the browsing area so you can return to it. This click-to-filter flow is what makes the cloud more than decoration. The sizes guide your eye, and the page turns a click into a real record list.
Where tags appear, and where they do not
An admin decides which objects and page layouts carry tags. In Tag Settings they enable personal tags, public tags, or both, then specify the objects and layouts that show a tag section at the top of record detail pages. That section is the entry point for adding tags and for jumping into the cloud. A few boundaries matter. Tags cannot be added to feed-based page layouts, so a record using that layout has no tag section. Customer Portal users cannot see the tag section even when a layout includes it. Search results and the Tags page do not display custom objects that lack an associated tab, even if tagging is enabled for that object. There is also a deliberate clash with Topics. Enabling Topics for an object disables public tags on records of that object type, though personal tags keep working. That single rule explains a lot of confusion in older orgs, because turning on one organizing feature quietly switches off the other. Knowing these gaps up front saves you from wondering why a tag section, or a public tag, never shows up where you expected it.
Limits that shape the cloud
Tagging carries a handful of ceilings worth knowing before you rely on the cloud. Each user can create up to 500 unique personal tags and can apply tags up to 5,000 times in total across records. When you edit a record, you can enter up to 10 new tags at once that have not been defined before; if you exceed a limit, new tags will not save and Salesforce points you back to the Tags page to clean up. At the org level, the whole instance can hold up to 5,000,000 personal and public tag applications across all users combined. If an org nears that cap, an admin can reclaim room by deleting the personal tags that belonged to deactivated users, which is a dedicated Setup action. These numbers affect the cloud indirectly. A user who hits the 500-tag wall stops seeing new labels appear, and an org pressing the five-million ceiling may find that tagging silently fails for everyone. The cloud only ever reflects tags that actually saved, so a sudden gap in expected labels often traces back to one of these limits rather than to the display itself.
Managing public tags and the Tag Manager permission
Personal tags are yours to rename or delete whenever you like. Public tags are shared, so changing them is governed by a permission. The Tag Manager profile permission lets a user rename and delete public tags across the org, and it only appears in profiles after the Public Tags feature has been activated for the org. Activation is a two-step path: Salesforce enables Public Tags for the org, then a system admin opens Setup, finds Tag Settings, and enables Public Tags there so the permission becomes assignable. Without Tag Manager, ordinary users can apply public tags but cannot tidy up the shared vocabulary, which is how public tag sets drift into duplicates and typos over time. Deleted tags are not gone for good right away. They move to the Recycle Bin and can be restored, so an accidental cleanup is recoverable. For the tag cloud, governance matters because the cloud is only as useful as the tag vocabulary behind it. A maintained public tag set produces a clean, meaningful cloud. An unmanaged one produces a cluttered cloud full of one-off labels that never grow large enough to help anyone.
Why it is legacy and what to use now
The tag cloud belongs to an earlier era of the Salesforce UI. The Tag Manager interface, the Tags page, and the weighted cloud are Salesforce Classic features, and the classic tag-management experience does not carry over to Lightning Experience. That is the practical reason this term is marked legacy. Orgs that have moved to Lightning typically reach for other tools to do the same job. Topics provide a shared, admin-governed way to label records around common themes and to view everything under a theme on a topic page, and they are the natural successor to public tags for cross-record grouping. For personal, private organizing, list views with filters and global search cover most of what people used personal tags for, with the benefit of working fully in Lightning. If your org still runs Classic and depends on the cloud, it continues to function, but treat it as supplementary rather than a long-term strategy. When you plan a Lightning migration, map each heavily used public tag to a Topic and each personal tagging habit to a saved list view, so the find-by-theme behavior survives the move even though the cloud itself does not.
Set up tags and the tag cloud in Salesforce Classic
Tag clouds only appear once an admin enables tagging and exposes the tag section and a Tags sidebar entry in Salesforce Classic. Here is the setup path. This applies to orgs still using Salesforce Classic.
- Open Tag Settings
From Setup in Salesforce Classic, enter Tag Settings in the Quick Find box and select Tag Settings.
- Enable the tag types you want
Select Enable Personal Tags, Enable Public Tags, or both. Public Tags may first need to be activated for the org by Salesforce before the option is meaningful.
- Choose objects and page layouts
Specify which objects and page layouts display a tag section at the top of record detail pages. Skip feed-based layouts, which cannot show tags.
- Surface the cloud in the sidebar
Optionally add the Tags component to the Classic sidebar so users get a quick link into the Tags page and the weighted cloud from anywhere.
Lets each user create private tags only they can see, up to 500 unique tags and 5,000 total applications per user.
Lets users apply org-visible tags; requires prior activation and pairs with the Tag Manager permission for cleanup.
A profile permission that allows renaming and deleting public tags; appears only after Public Tags is activated.
Controls exactly where the tag section, and therefore the path to the cloud, shows up across record detail pages.
- Enabling Topics for an object disables public tags on that object; personal tags keep working.
- The Tags page and search ignore custom objects that have no associated tab, even if tagging is enabled for them.
- Customer Portal users cannot see the tag section even when a page layout includes it.
- The tag cloud and Tag Manager UI are Classic only and do not move to Lightning Experience.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Find Records Using Salesforce Classic TagsSalesforce
- Topics and Tags SettingsSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Tag Cloud.
- Tag Records in Salesforce ClassicSalesforce
- Enable TagsSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Tag Cloud.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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