Externals (NVivo 14 Mac)

Externals are proxy documents to represent data items that you cannot import into a project, such as books, analog film, websites or computer files (e.g. PowerPoint presentations). You can put whatever information you want into the externals you create—for example, summarize book chapters or transcribe movie dialog. If the represented item is a file on your computer you can link to it. Like other NVivo documents, you can code and annotate the content in externals, and link to memos.

Externals are automatically created when you import bibliographical data from reference management tools.

Create an external

1. From the Data section of the Navigation View, open Externals or any of its sub-folders in the List View. Ctrl + click in the empty area at the bottom of the List View and select New External in the menu.
2. Enter a name for the external.
3. (Optional) Enter a description.
4. From the Type pop-up menu, select whether the external is:
   • A file stored on your computer—select the file path.
   • A web page—enter the URL.
   • Another type of item that is not accessible electronically, like a book or artifact—specify the physical location of the item in the Location description field.
5. (Optional) you can choose some pre-formatting options (for example, automatically create chapter headings for a book). From the Contents list, select the type of material you are working with, then select the units for organizing the content, and then enter a start and end range for the units (for example, chapters 1 to 10).
6. Click Done.

Open a file linked to an external

If you have created an external to represent a file on your computer, you can link the file to the external and open it directly from the external.

1. Select or open the external.
2. On the Home tab, in the Item menu, select Open Item > External File.