Adding Documents

Video Tutorial: Creating a project and adding data.

What happens when you add documents to a project

All documents that you add to a project are copied, and the copies become internal ATLAS.ti files. This means, strictly speaking, that ATLAS.ti no longer needs the original files. However, we strongly recommend that you keep a backup copy of your original source files.

What happens when you add documents to a project

All documents that you add to a project are copied, and the copies become internal ATLAS.ti files. This means, strictly speaking, that ATLAS.ti no longer needs the original files. However, we strongly recommend that you keep a backup copy of your original source files.

As audio and video files can be quite sizable, you have the option to create an external reference to the files. This means the multimedia documents remain at their original location and are accessed from there. Preferably, these files should not be moved to a different location. If the files need to be moved, you need to re-link the files to your project. ATLAS.ti will alert you, if there is an issue, and a file can no longer be accessed.

Important for team projects

When you work in a team and want to work on the same documents, it is important that one person is setting up the project and adds all documents and codes that should be shared. The reason for this is that all all entities are stamped with a unique ID when they are created. This ID allows ATLAS.ti to detect if entities are the same when merging projects.

If the same documents (or codes) are added on different computers to different projects, then they all have different IDs. Rather than being merged when you merge all projects, they are added. Thus, the merged project contains duplicates. You can merge duplicated codes yourself, but you cannot merge duplicated documents! If this happens, you need to manually transfer all coding that has been done from the duplicated documents. See Team Work for further information.

How to Add Documents

From the main menu, select Document > Add Documents. Another option is to open the drop-down menu of the document button in the toolbar, or you can just drag files from Finder onto the left sidebar in ATLAS.ti.

If you want to link a video file, select the option Reference External Multimedia Documents. For further information see Adding Multimedia Data.

If you want to write your own text, e.g. in order to transcribe data, select the option New Text Document.

You can of course also import iranscripts; see Importing Transcripts. Or prepare your own transcripts.

Adding a document

All added or linked documents are numbered consecutively starting with 1, 2, 3 and so on.

The default sort order is by name in alphabetical order. The document order cannot be changed in the Mac version.

Size Restrictions

Theoretically, size restrictions do not play a major role due to the way ATLAS.ti handles documents. However, you should bear in mind that your computer's processing speed and storage capacity may affect the performance.

Excessively large documents can be uncomfortable to work with, even when you have an excellently equipped computer.

For textual documents, the number and size of embedded objects may cause extraordinarily long load times. There is a high likelihood that if a textual document loads slowly in ATLAS.ti, it would also load slowly in Word or WordPad.

For very long texts or multimedia files, scrolling to exact positions can be cumbersome.

Please keep those issues in mind when preparing your files.

A Word about "Big Data"

Please keep in mind that the focus of ATLAS.ti is to support qualitative data analysis and to a lesser extent the analysis of qualitative data.

Big data is a buzz word nowadays, and a lot of big data often comes as text or images, hence could be considered qualitative. ATLAS.ti, however, is not suited for true big data analysis, which is not the same as qualitative data analysis.

As point of orientation, coding can be supported using the auto coding feature. However, you still need to read and correct the coding, and most coding in ATLAS.ti is done while the researcher reads the data and creates or selects and applies a code that fits.

A project is too large if you have so much data that you need to rely on a machine to do all the coding for you, and you cannot read what has been coded yourself. While we are adding natural language processing tools to ATLAS.ti as well as continuously improving performance for large projects, these tools are designed to help you as a researcher, not replace the human. While it may sometimes seem otherwise, computers still can't think.