Best Practice

Make use of comments and annotations in Word and PDF files

With the update to version 22.1, ATLAS.ti will recognize all annotations and comments – also handwritten ones – and will turn them into quotations when you import a PDF or Word document. The annotation or comment text will be added as a comment to the quotation. Drawings or handwritten comments will be imported as image quotations.

Susanne Friese

Product specialist, trainer and author of the book "Qualitative Data Analysis with ATLAS.ti"

Introduction
How it works
A case example

Introduction

We have been listening to you. Many of you use the annotation function for PDF documents and the comment function in Word. For example, to write down ideas and insights when reading a journal article or report that you need for your research. Those ideas were lost until now when you added those files to ATLAS.ti.

How it works

With the update to version 22.1, ATLAS.ti will recognize all annotations and comments – also handwritten ones – and will turn them into quotations. The annotation or comment text will be added as a quotation comment. Drawings or handwritten comments will be imported as image quotations. (In ATLAS.ti Windows, this is currently only supported for PDF documents.)

All imported comments from Word documents will be turned into quotations and labeled with the code name Imported comments.

All imported comments from PDF documents will be turned into quotations and labeled with the code name Imported annotations. This also applies to PDF documents you import via the Reference Manager import option.

To import Word documents with comments, or PDF documents with annotations, click on the Add Documents button or menu option in the Mac version and select a document with comments or annotations. Suppose you import documents for a literature review and use the Reference Manger import option. In that case, all annotations you have written in your favorite reference manager will also be imported.

Figure 1: PDF document with annotations imported in ATLAS.ti Mac

Figure 2: PDF document with handwritten comments and drawings imported in ATLAS.ti Mac

A case example

Perhaps you first read a transcript in Word and write initial coding ideas as comments in the margin. If you add this transcript to ATLAS.ti, all commented segments will be marked as quotations.

Figure 3: Initial ideas for coding prepared in Word document

In ATLAS.ti Windows – if you open the Quotation Manager alongside the document, you can read the comments you wrote.
In ATLAS.ti Mac - You can read the comments you have written in the inspector on the right-hand side.