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MAXQDA12 Tip of the month: Use the Overview of Memos to keep track of your memos and notes

All of your notes at your fingertips: You might already use memos to jot down your thoughts while you analyze your qualitative data, to attach coding instructions to your code sytsem or to attach case summaries to your interviews. Memos can be attached to any part of your data e.g. your codes, documents or be placed right inside a text document where MAXQDA will display them as little yellow post-it-notes.

A document memo (the memo window to the right) is assigned to a document and may contain a summary or further information about the source.

But did you know that you can also write down anything you want in a free memo (Analysis > New free memo) that is not attached to any special part of your data? Use free memos to start writing your conclusions right inside of MAXQDA or use memos to communicate with your research team members, e.g. use exclamation point memos to flag important info everybody should read.

Overview of memos – keeping track of your memos

Once you have written up quite a few memos it can be hard to keep track of all the valuable information in your project. This is why the „Overview of memos“ is there to help you keep track of all of your memos and thoughts. Open the overview by navigating to: Analysis > Overview of memos or click on the icon maxqda-memo-manager-icon in the toolbar. The overview is a database of all of your memos. They are organized in a table view, with columns for every possible information about a memo you might need (author, title, created, preview, attached to, memo type). This way you can easily organize, sort, search, open and export your memos in one single place. Just click on any columns header to sort the column alphabetically. Or search across all of your memos for a specific word.

Searching for the word “Mary” in the overview window shows all memos containing the word “Mary” either in the memo title or in the memo content.

Convenient: If you click on a memo, MAXQDA jumps right into the source document and displays the part of the document you attached the memo to.

For further information on working with memos, watch our video tutorial


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