Often you may wish to import documents that are structured and pre-coded. Examples for this kind of document include:

• Forms – in this case, text passages should be pre-coded according to the heading field of the form.
• Answers to open-ended questions in survey research – here you may wish to code the answers with a question number or an abbreviation of the question.
• Results from database retrievals, such as a list of references, should be pre-coded with author, title, abstract, etc.

It is often clear even before you start your analysis that certain sections of text are going to pertain to a certain subject. So, to save the work of manually coding them, you can have them automatically coded during the import process.

As an example of this type of document, consider the answers to open-ended questions in questionnaires. Unlike narrative interviews, a document of this kind does not contain thirty or fifty pages but rather only a few lines, perhaps 10 to 15. Often there will be a large number of documents, maybe a few hundred or more. Another characteristic of such a document is that it is pre-structured: certain answers correspond to certain questions. The normal method of transcription and import into MAXQDA would make importing the documents a very time-consuming job. Every questionnaire would have to be transcribed with a word processing program and saved as a separate file. Attaching a question to its answer as a code to its corresponding text passage would not be possible when importing the text.

Also when working with focus groups, it saves a lot of time to code the text passages with their speakers before importing the text into MAXQDA. The MAXQDA Preprocessor offers a solution for this type of data.

There are three options for coding during import: you can use the Preprocessor, the Excel table import option or you can import bibliographical data in RIS format.