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External Links

External links are links between a segment of a text or image in MAXQDA and a document outside of the project (e.g. to link part of an interview transcript in MAXQDA with a picture of the person saved elsewhere on your computer).

Insert external links in an open document

To insert an external link, simply highlight a section of text or image, right-click on it, and select Insert External Link. A window will then appear where you can select the appropriate external document to be linked. This can be on your internal hard drive, an external medium like a flash drive, or a network location.

External links, for text documents, are blue and underlined like the internal links, or in a blue frame for PDF and image documents. When you hover the mouse over the link, a tooltip appears with the name and location of the linked document. Clicking on the link opens the document in the appropriate program. For example, clicking on a link to an image file in JPG format will open the file in an image viewer program.

Defining external links for documents

You can not only insert external links for a position in a document, but also define an external link for the entire document. Such an external link is not created in the "Document Browser", where the content of the document is displayed, but in the "List of Documents", where all data of a project is listed.

To add an external link to a whole document:

  1. Right-click the document name and choose Properties from the context menu.
  2. A window will open in which you can assign up to three links to external files in the "External Links" section. Click on one of the three lines with the mouse to select it and then click on the icon with the three dots to select a file.

The external links appear in the context menu of a document and can be opened from there at any time:

Please note: This form of external links is not listed in the "Overview Links".

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