Settings
The settings screen allows you to change several features including language, coder name and font type and font size, as well as options for the AI integration.
Multiple coders can code the same text. A new coder name can be entered in the text box. You can choose an existing coder from the drop down box. The coder name is 'default' when first using QualCoder. When opening another existing project, please make sure the coder name is set to the name you want to use by checking and updating the Settings before you do work on your project. Please note that only the current coder name is specially stored. If you enter a series of coder names in settings, new coder names are not stored, unless they are actively used, i.e. by importing a file, creating a code, coding text etc.
The default language of QualCoder is English. Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, Swedish are alternative languages. Some languages have not been thoroughly reviewed for accuracy of translations. When changing a language, you need to close then reopen QualCoder for the change to occur.
Checking the Show IDs box displays the numeric IDs for codes files cases and more. These IDs may be useful when writing sql queries.
There area few options to change the overall look of QualCoder.
For transcribing audio and video, the time format and bracket type can be selected.
Very large text files can slow the coding mode in QualCoder. So a right-click option in Code Text is to load smaller sized chunks of the text. 50,000 characters is the default size, but this can be changed in Settings to smaller sizes for slower computers.
Backups
Project backup can be set to automatically backup every hour, or no backup. QualCoder keeping the most recent backups with a date and hour time stamp. The backup name is: projectname_BKP_yyyymmdd_hh.qda Where hh is 24 hour time. This also means multiple backups are not done within an hour. So a new backup cannot overwrite another backup created within the same hour. A limited number of backups are kept, older backups are deleted. Setting option allows you to choose from 1 to 10 backups.
I recommend that you make a backup before doing any substantial changes, such as reorganising codes and categories, merging projects, or merging codes. QualCoder does perform hourly backups (keeping up to the most recent five) if backups are set in the settings.
Rename or move to another location particular backups that you need to keep. When the backups are set, an additional option is to choose to backup the audio/video files. For completeness of backups it is recommended to back up audio and video, however this may slow down opening of the software if you have many large files. Alternatively you can link to large audio/video files rather than import them into the project folder. The default project directory is where many file operations will default to, for export or looking to import files.
In your home folder QualCoder will create a .qualcoder folder with a QualCoder.log file for logging events and a config.ini file which will contain a lot of settings such as the current coder’s name, preferred fonts, language and a preferred working directory. Do not sure any data or project inside the .qualcoder folder. The only file that you should put in here is a stopwords.txt file, only if you need to apply a different set of stopwords for word cloud and word count functions. This folder is only for the QualCoder software to use as it is running.
Advanced options and logging
The AI related options at the bottom of the Settings dialog are described here: AI Setup