Use coding stripes to explore coding

Coding stripes are colored bars that show you the nodes that code the content you are viewing.

Coding stripes showing coding in a document.

You can hover over a coding stripe to see more information or right-click on a stripe to:

  • Highlight coding for the node that the stripe represents (content is highlighted in yellow)
  • Open the node in Detail View
  • Uncode all content coded at the node (only content in the file or node you are working with is uncoded)

You cannot display coding stripes when a file is in edit mode.

Click the Expand button (at the top right of Detail View) to make more room for working with your data. Customize the workspace

Show coding stripes

  1. Open the file or node.
  2. On the View tab, in the Coding group, click Coding Stripes and then choose an option.
    • All Nodes Coding—show coding stripes for all the theme, case and relationship nodes that code the content.
    • Nodes Recently Coding—see the coding you have just done. This is one way to check that you coded the content to the correct node.
    • Nodes Most Coding or Nodes Least Coding—Showing the nodes that most or least code the content can help you to see the dominant themes in your files.
    • Selected Items—these could be thematic nodes, case nodes, relationship nodes.
    • Coding Density Only—this might help you save space.

Check coding density

The Coding Density bar is displayed to the left of the colored coding stripes.

Coding Density bar in the Coding Stripes panel.

You can hover over the Coding Density bar to see the nodes that code the related content. The color graduations indicate the coding density: light gray (minimal coding) to dark gray (maximum coding). The coding density is calculated based on all nodes that code the content—not just those that are currently displayed in the coding stripes.

Change the color scheme for your coding stripes

When you display coding stripes, you can choose either automatic (show random system-generated colors) or item colors (show colors you have assigned to users or nodes).

Print coding stripes

You can print a file or node along with its coding stripes, when the file is open in Detail View with coding stripes displayed.

When you print documents, memos, externals or print the Reference view of a node, coding stripes are printed on the same page as the file or node content—the file or node content is scaled and rotated to allow space on the page for the coding stripes. If you have a large number of stripes displayed, NVivo may not be able to fit them all on the page.

Printed document with coding stripes displayed on the right.