MAXQDA offers the possibility to work with PDF files in your qualitative research. In MAXQDA, PDF documents are displayed exactly how they look in any other PDF reader. No layout or formatting will be lost, unlike in other software that converts PDF documents to text files such as RTF or DOC/DOCX. Don’t worry about the layout, just import your PDF files into MAXQDA and get started.Code text segments or pictures or both and watch how fast MAXQDA reacts even when you work with very large PDF documents of a thousand pages or more.

For all of these areas, MAXQDA offers unique and easy-to-use QDA features for your analysis.
You don’t need to convert your documents into another format before importing them into MAXQDA.

PDF documents hold tremendous advantages when it comes to displaying documents with a complicated layout, unusual font, or a lot of pictures and illustrations. Nothing about the layout will be lost or look any different from the original. The special technical language PDF files are written in makes all of this possible, but it is also responsible for the few limitations of PDFs when it comes to your analysis.

PDF files & MAXQDA: What you should be aware of

• Text-oriented features, like the search for a certain word, will of course only be possible in PDF files that contain textual content (and not in scans of text in which the words are scanned to an image file). You might need to use an optical character recognition tool (OCR) to recognize the text first. You can test this by trying to select some text in your PDF document.
• PDF documents do not contain meta information about the text like “sentence” or “paragraph”. Single words in a PDF document only contain the information where exactly on a page this word should be placed. Therefore, a few features, like automatic coding of sentences, cannot be used when working with PDFs. Only single words can be coded automatically.
• If you are working with many very large PDF files, MAXQDA will eventually start to react a bit slower. You can prevent this by using large files in MAXQDA as external files.

• Download our leaflet MAXQDA – with full PDF functionality
• More information about the amazing navigation options for PDF files in MAXQDA
• Short Video: How to use PDFs in MAXQDA