The Document Manager

The Document Manager helps you to organize your data, to group documents or to filter them.

Further you can access:

• the Search & Code tools if you want to code your data automatically

• the focus group coding tool to auto code speaker units or other structural information on your data.

• the word clouds or word lists for exploring your documents.

• you can search for concepts.

• You can create reports or view geo locations in Google Maps.

Status Bar: The status bar at the bottom of the screen shows how many documents there are in the project. ID: The first column shows the blue document icon, and the document number. The document number is a consecutive number given to the document by ATLAS.ti when it is added to a project.

Name: The default name is the file name of the original source file that you added to the ATLAS.ti project. You can rename each document if you prefer a different name.

Location: Here you see whether a document is stored in the ATLAS.ti library or whether ATLAS.ti opens it from a linked location. For further information see Adding Documents.

Below the document list you see a Code Distribution across Documents. You can switch between seeing a document preview or the bar charts.

Filter

Click on one or more document groups in the filter area on the left to set a local filter. This means only the items in the manager are filtered.

If you want to filter the entire project, right-click on a document group to set a global filter. See Applying Global Filters For Data Analysis.

The Document Manager Ribbon

From left to right:

Add Document(s): Add a new document to your project. See Adding Documents.

New Group: Create a new document group.See Working With Groups.

New Smart Group: Smart Groups are a combination of existing document groups using Boolean operators. See Working With Smart Groups for further detail.

Search & Code: Here you can directly access the various search and code functions offered by ATLAS.ti to automatically code your data. See Search & Code for further information.

Focus Group Coding: You can automatically code all speaker units in a focus group. See Focus Group Coding for further information. This option can also be used to code data units in other type of structural data.

Rename: When adding a document to an ATLAS.ti project, the default name is the file name. You can change this name internally in ATLAS.ti. It does not change the name of data file.

Delete: Remove selected document(s) from a project. This is a permanent deletion. It also means that all coding done on the document(s) is deleted. You can revert the action using UnDo, but only within the currently active session.

Edit Comment: Open a text editor for writing or editing a comment for a selected document. See Working With Comments And Memos.

Open Group Manager: See Working With Groups.

Open Network: Open a network on the selected document(s). The network only contains the document and does not display links yet. This option is for instance useful if you want to compare cases. See Analytic Functions in Networks.

Word Cloud: Word Clouds visualize the frequency of words. The more frequent a word occurs, the larger the word is displayed in the image. Word Clouds are an exploratory tool that allow you to gain quick inside into your data. It can be the basis for auto coding and further analysis. See Creating Word Clouds.

Word List: This function allows you to generate a list of all words that occur in selected documents. The list can be sorted in alphabetic order or by frequency. You can export it to Excel for further data crunching. See Word Lists.

Concepts: Let ATLAS.ti find concepts in your data that you then can review and autocode. See Find Concepts.

Report / Excel Export: Reports can be created as text file (Word, PDF), or in Excel format. All reports are customizable. See Creating Reports.

Tools Tab

Renumber Documents: When adding documents to a project, they are numbered by ATLAS.ti in consecutive order. If you remove one or more documents, this may result in gaps. Use this option to close these gaps.

You can also use this option to re-order documents the way you want them to be ordered. To achieve this, rename the document in a way so that sorting them by name results in the order you want them to be in. Next click on the 'name' column to sort the documents by name and then select the 'renumber' option. The document numbers will then follow the alphabetical order. See also Managing Documents.

Renumber Quotations: Selecting this option will close any gap in the numbering of quotations.

Each quotation that you create has an ID. The ID consists of the document number, and a number indicating the chronological order when the quotation was created. For example, the ID 3:12 means that this quotation is in document 3 and that it was the twelfth quotation that was created in this document.

If you delete quotations or modify them, the ID does not change. If you delete a quotation with the ID 3:11, this does not mean that quotation 3:12 automatically becomes quotation 3:11. Such an automatism is not always desired. If you for instance have already started the writing process and made reference to some quotations using their ID, you would not want ATLAS.ti to change the IDs automatically.

If you do want all quotations to be numbered in sequential order, you need to evoke it manually by selecting the Renumber Quotations option.

Import Transcript: This option is available after you have added a multimedia document (audio or video). If you have a transcript with timestamps for this document, you can add it as transcript. The transcript and multimedia document are synchronized via the time marks. See Importing Multimedia Transcripts.

Document Export: This option allows you to export your documents as external data files. Text files are exported as Word docx files, all PDF. image and multimedia files in their original format.

Repair Link: If you have linked an audio or video file to a project, and the link is no longer valid, you can repair the link using this option.

Remove Codings: You can use this option if you want to unlink all codes from all quotations. This means all quotations and all codes remain in the document, but none of the quotation is coded. This is useful at times for team projects and inter-coder agreement analysis.

Browse Geo Location; All geo documents are based on Open Street Map or Bing. If you want to see a geo-location in Google Maps, you can use this option. See Working With Geo Docs.

Duplicate document(s): This allows you to create an exact copy of one or more documents with all quotations, codes, links, ect. This can be useful if for instance you want to code a document based on different aspects. This option will allow you to split a document, also when it is already coded. You duplicate it first, then (entering edit mode) you delete the second part of one document, and the first part in the other.

Search & Filter / View Tab

As these tabs are the same in all manager, they are discussed here Entity Manager.