MAXQDA 2007 – New Update, New Features
In addition to the release of MAXDictio 2007 in September 2007, we are introducing many interesting innovations to MAXQDA 2007. Most of the new functions concern the Visual Tools of MAXQDA. As a license holder of MAXQDA 2007, you will get all these new functions for free. Simply press the menu command “?” in MAXQDA and select “Search for Updates”. Here is an overview of the 23 new functions:
Text Portrait
- Focusing: A new option “Only for Active Texts” allows you to restrict the visual presentation to selected codes.
- Live connection to the data set: The Text Portrait is now interactive, so (as with the “Codeline” function), clicking on a symbol in the graphic will let you see the concerned text segment in the Text Browser. The function only works for the sequential presentation of overlapping codes and not when the option “Mixed Colors for Overlapping Codes” has been selected.
Crosstabs
- Focusing: When starting with this function, a dialog field “Only for Active Texts” will appear, allowing you to conduct a selection of texts for the cross table.
- Automatic take-over of attribute values: During the selection of an attribute, an option now allows you to automatically take over all values of an attribute in the cross table. If one wants to differentiate the frequencies of a code by different education levels, for exampe, one does not have to select each education level of the attribute “Educational Background”. All of them can be selected at one swoop.
- Choice of reference for percentage calculation: By clicking on the “Crosstabs” button in the dialog field, it can be determined what will be used as a reference figure for the percentage calculation of column and cell percentages: the number of texts or the number of coded segments. Until now the function “Crosstabs”, which was introduced for the first time in MAXQDA 2007, had always based its percentages on the number of coded segments. Theoretically, though, all codings of a specific code could be in the same text.
Code-Relations-Browser
- Focusing selections: This tool, which visually presents the overlapping of codes, now lets you determine the codes on the X-axis and the Y-axis apart from each other. Until now a complete matrix of the overlapping of all codes would be created automatically. Now a segment of this matrix may be selected to be displayed.
- Use of the weight filter: The weighting option now has a similar effect on the Code-Relations-Browser as in the complex retrieval functions. For example, if the weighting filter is turned on, only such coded segments will be displayed that own weightings within the previously-set margins.
Code-Matrix-Browser (C-M-B)
- Aggregation: The CMB represents the amount of codings each text contains for the selected code(s). If the sub-categories in the graphical presentation are turned off, the frequencies will now be aggregated to the next highest level.
Text Comparison Chart (T-C-C)
- Focusing option: The display may now be restricted to the activated codes through a dialog box.
Codeline
- Flexible display: The Codeliner displays the coded segments of a selected text in sequential form. The width of a column in pixels is now freely adjustable, allowing you to create a chart that perfectly suits your wishes. The minimum column width is determined by the required space for the paragraph number.
Texts and Text-Retrieval
- “New text” accessibility: The function “Create Text” now creates a new text in the Document System, opens this text in the Text Browser and switches it into the edit mode.
- New option for importing structured texts: After selecting the function “Import Structured Texts”, a dialog box will appear letting you decide how to handle the code information after the key word “#CODE”. In MAXQDA 2007 the string following behind “#CODE” would be taken as a code name but skipped it in the imported text. Now it is possible to take these code names over into the final text. This could be important for transcribed focus group discussions, for example, because the name of the speaker should not only be coded but also continue to visibly appear in the text.
- New options for importing tables: When importing structured texts from an Excel table you may choose in a dialog field how an empty cell of the table will be dealt with during the import: whether it will be skipped or created as an empty, coded paragraph.
- Extra view of external links: If a text contains external links, they will now be listed in the “Overview of Links”. They have their own symbol (red arrow), which will be listed in the column of the overview. This way the table can be sorted in such a way that all external links will be listed after each other.
- Additional display for memos: The memo column in the “Retrieved Segments Window” now offers a new option “Display Memos” when one right-clicks on it. This way the display of memo symbols can be suppressed, which speeds up MAXQDA if you have written a lot of memos.
- New options for text export: Texts which are displayed in the Text Browser may now be exported as a table with prefixed paragraph numbers. This presentation is primarily useful for the documentation of texts in the appendix of research reports and such. Memos and coded segments will not be taken over in this presentation. It should only contain pure texts without any pictures or other objects.
Code System
- Color-Coding flexibility: The color of a code and all its sub codes may now be changed with just one single command.
- Color-Coding flexibility in the Code System list view: The option “Select Color” has now been integrated into the context menu of the list view in the Code System. So, it is now also possible to set the color for multiple codes simultaneously here.
- New option to “transform code to attribute”: An additional option “Transform into binary attribute” has been inserted. This option will only be differentiated between the values 0 (code does not appear in the text) and 1 (code appears in the text), meaning that the amount of coded segments is of no importance.
Other Innovations
- Default value “0″ for weighted codes: The default value for the weighting attribute of codings after the installation of MAXQDA has been changed to “0″.
- Changing code weight with life connection to the data set: If the default weight is changed during research, all coded segments coded with the default value will automatically be changed to the new default value. So, if one is to change the default value from 0 to 100 all coded segments with the weight “0″ will be switched to “100″.
- Visualized display of different attribute types: The attributes in MAXQDA now contain an additional attribute “Source”, which gives you information on how the concerned attribute has been created. Four different types of attributes are now distinguished in MAXQDA:
- System attributes: created automatically – color: Red
- Researcher-designed attributes: they are defined by the user – color: Blue
- Automatically-generated attributes: created by use of the function “convert to attribute” in the Code system – color: Green.
- MAXDictio attributes: created optionally in the MAXDictio Coder Result Table – color: Yellow.
- HTML export of lexical search results: The results of a text retrieval may now also be exported as an HTML file and in such a way that the exported context may be determined freely.
