Getting started – Organize

NVivo allows you to code text, images, PDF text and images, and selections in media files. You can create codes up front and then find relevant content or create them as you go. Coding stripes and highlighting allow you to see what content has been coded. You can organize codes in folders and in parent/child relationships.

Memos are free-style notepads that you can add to whenever you want. You can quickly add timestamps for new entries with the keystroke Cmd +Shift +T. [Not in video: Memos accept text, images and tables, and can be coded and given file attributes like data files.]

Create new memos from the Create tab. Memos created this way are not linked to any project items.

Alternatively, if you have a code, file, or other project item open, use the Memo Link menu in the context-sensitive tab to create a memo that is linked to the item. Right-click on the item at any time to open the linked memo, and vice versa.

All memos are saved in the Memos folder.

Annotations can be created for text selections in documents, PDFs and media transcripts, portions of images in image files and PDFs, and time spans in media files.

To create annotations, select the text, image or time span you want to annotate then clickNew Annotation in the contextual menu. After you've written the annotation the content that it is linked to is highlighted and the annotation appears in a popup box opened from the Detail View toolbar.

Cases represent people, places or institutions involved in your study. You can code content to cases in the same way you code it to themes, bringing together all the content related to the people, places or institutions you’ve identified. This can be done manually, or with suitably formatted files, automatically.

NVivo’s case classifications are collections of case properties, or ‘attributes’. By grouping attributes you can apply them to all your cases of the same type, ensuring you record the same metadata for all of them.

Once a case has a case classification applied to it, you should input the ‘values’ for each of the attributes in the classification. You can do this case-by-case, from the Case Properties dialog box (right-click on each case), or open the classification sheet (double-click the classification after you’ve opened Case Classifications). This gives you an editable table of all the cases with that classification and all their attribute values.