Manage cases
Cases are useful for collating various files to a particular circumstance or person. Cases can have attributes such as age and gender for participants. You can add a memo of notes to each case and rename a case by double-clicking on a case name. Not all projects need cases, for example a project of individual interviews would be loaded as individual text transcripts, and those files can be assigned attributes in Manage Files, such as persons role, age, etc.
A table lists the cases and their attributes. The number of files associated with a case is shown. Click on the Files cell in the table to add or change files associated with that case. This displays the case file manager dialog, described below.
When a survey is imported, each survey row is assigned to a case. The case name is the unique identifier in the first column of the csv or Excel spreadsheet. Large surveys (e.g. 1000 or more rows) can take a long time to import as cases take some time to create.
The buttons here:
- Create a new case
- Add a case attribute
- Import cases from csv or xlsx file
- Open the case-file manager
- Export case attributes to xlsx file
- Delete a case
- Help button
Hiding and showing rows and columns
Hide columns by right-click on the table header row for options to hide that column or to hide columns beginning with specific text. Or to show columns starting with a text value. Hide rows by right-click menu and selecting a text value that equals or 'is like' some chosen text. Right click to order by case name or by attribute value, ascending or descending.
Practical example: Add the three students (or cases) by clicking the Add case icon. Name each student: ID1, ID2 and ID3.
Case file manager
Now, add each student’s file to each student. Click on the cell in the Files column for case ID3 for example. This opens the case file manager dialog. Alternatively, click on the documents icon which will also open the case file manager.
In the case file manager, click on a case, say ID3, then click Add selected files to case button. Select one or more files in the files list. Add the files to the case. For example add the miguel-henriques.jpg to ID3. You can remove files and view the files associated with the case. You will see file text will be underlined in red which indicates this text is associated with this case.
You can also select a case, manually highlight text portions within a larger text document, and right-click to mark – or assign -the text to the selected case.
Importing cases and case attributes
You can import attributes from a CSV or XLSX file using this button:
The first row must contain the attribute headings. The first column must contain matching case names (for this example: ID1, ID2, ID3). Note that this is case sensitive. Open the cases.csv file in the Examples folder to see how it is laid out.
For this example – delete all the cases shown. Then, import the attributes from the cases.csv file through the Import Attributes dialog. You will again need to link the files and file text to each case.
Exporting case information
You can export the Cases table to an Excel (xlsx) file, using this button: