Reorder and organize nodes

Nodes express your growing understanding of the concepts and cases within your data.  Your understanding of the nodes in your project may change over the course of your analysis. For example, you may want to simplify your node structure by merging nodes that have the same meaning.

What do you want to do? Descriptions

Sort nodes

  1. Click in the List View
  2. On the Home tab, in the Workspace group, click Sort By, and then click a sort option.

By default, nodes are organized alphanumerically in List View.

Reorder nodes

  1. Select a node in the List View
  2. On the Home tab, in the Workspace group, click Sort By, and then click Custom.
  3. Click Sort By again, and then click Move Up or Move Down.

If you subsequently change the sort order for nodes, you can easily return to your customized order by choosing Custom again.

Copy or move nodes

  1. In List View, click the required node then press CTRL+C to copy or CTRL+X to move.
  2. Click a destination node folder or parent node then press CTRL+V.
    If you paste the node onto another node you create a node hierarchy. The node you moved becomes the child of the other node. Aggregate nodes (gather all content in a parent node)

You can also drag and drop nodes to move them between folders.

When you copy or move a node, it retains its classification, coding, annotations, links and relationships.

Merge nodes

You can merge one or more nodes into a new node or into an existing node. Merging can be a useful when two nodes have a similar meaning or content—for example, you could merge the nodes farming and cultivation into the node agriculture.

  1. In List View, select the nodes that you want to merge into a new or existing node.
  2. Press CTRL+C (or CTRL+X to delete the nodes).
  3. In the List View, select the target node you want to merge with, or the node folder where you want to create the new node.
  4. On the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, click Merge, and then select a merge option. The Merge into Node dialog box opens.
  5. Select options for merging:
    • Merge child nodes If the nodes being merged have child nodes, move the children to the target parent node.
    • Copy see also links Merge content including any see also links.
    • Append linked memos Add the content of any linked memos to the end of the target's linked memo.
    • Copy relationships If the nodes being merged are part of a relationship, update the relationship to point to the target node.

NOTE  If you merge a child node into a parent node that has aggregation turned on, NVivo will count the references twice (unless you delete the merged child node).

Edit the node name

  • Click on the node name in List View, and then click again. This will make the name editable. Press Enter to save your changes.

Use the Description field to add information about the meaning of the node so that you (or your team members) can use them consistently when coding. Share a list of your nodes and their descriptions by exporting a codebook. The Description column is not visible by default—you can display the Description column in List View.

Organize nodes into folders

Just like files, you can organize nodes in folders to suit the way you work:

  • Nodes
    • Themes
    • Survey questions and responses
  • Cases
    • Survey Respondents
    • Interview Participants

You can use folders to set the scope of a query—for example, run a Text Search query on all the material in the Interview Participants folder.

Within folders, you can further organize nodes into hierarchies (parents and children) by dragging nodes onto other nodes. Aggregate nodes (gather all content in a parent node)