The Notes Browser and Notes Reports

It is common in qualitative research to end up with a lot of analytic memos that contain details about the observations and connections you have made from your data. Transana provides the Notes Browser to make it easier for you to review your Notes so that you can harvest insights and ideas from them during the analytic process and as you write up your results.

The Notes Browser

 

Go to the Tools menu and select Notes Browser.  The Notes Browser organizes your Notes by type, showing all of the Collection Notes as a group, all of the Clip Notes as a group, etc. This allows you to move through similar types of Notes more quickly.

Click on a Note to display the Note text in the Notes Browser’s right-hand pane.

You can edit the Note in the Notes Browser if desired. You can also right-click the Note in the left-hand pane to get a popup menu of options for manipulating Notes. Different types of Notes have different options including locating Notes in the Database Tree and opening Quotes, Clips, and Snapshots associated with Notes for review.

Doing a Note Search

 

You can also search for text across notes to find Notes that you are looking for more easily. For example, it is common to have ideas for further exploration of your data during your analytic work, ideas that you want to follow up on later so as not to interrupt your current train of thought. You might record such ideas in your Notes and flag them with a common phrase such as “Follow Up” to make them easier to find later.

Click on the Note Search tab in the Notes Browser. Type a term that you know appears at least once in your text into the Search Text box, then press the Search button. Text Search is not case sensitive in this context.

Only Notes that contain the appropriate text will be included in the Notes window below the search box. To see all of your Notes again, return to the Notes tab.

The Notes Report

 

From the Notes tab, right-click any of the root nodes (Library, Document, Episode, Transcript, Collection, Quote, Clip, or Snapshot.)  Each node has its own Notes Report showing the Notes under that that node. If you right-click the main Database node, you can get a Notes Report that includes all Notes in your database. The filter dialog allows you to select a subset of Notes to be included in the report if desired. The report can also be saved as a Text document (in DOCx, RTF, or HTML format) and can be printed.

It is also possible to include Notes in the Document Report, the Episode Report, and the Collection Report by selecting the desired Notes options through the filter dialog.