For all of ATLAS.ti's textual entities, specific tools make their creation, access, linking, commenting and other managerial activities very comfortable to carry out. They are especially designed to cope with large quantities of such entities, i.e. codes, documents, memos and data segments.

Object Explorer

While the advanced networking features of ATLAS.ti encourage the creation of sophisticated theories, hierarchical treeviews help you keep track of the objects created so far within the hermeneutic unit.

The Object Explorer is shown below.

The root displays primary documents, codes, memos, families, and networks of the major object class.

You can navigate comfortably through the network of codes and other text entities.

Even queries can be viewed and analyzed as hierarchies.

Of course, quotations can be easily activated within the main editor using the Object Explorer. The "Display Quotations" item of the code Air's popup menu is disabled because no quotations have been assigned.

Primary Document Manager

For many operations, the Primary Document Manager is easier to handle than the drop-down list. For instance, using drag & drop, files can be directly and very efficiently assigned to an HU.

The PD Manager also allows the documents to be rearranged using a drag & drop function.

One document is selected in the PD Manager. Its comment is displayed in the text pane below the document list.

The Primary Document Manager with one PD selected. Its comment displayed in the text pane. Single-click selects a quotation. If a comment has been written for the selected PD, it is displayed in the text pane below.

Code Manager

Along with the HU Editor, the Code Manager will probably be one of your most frequently used tools.

By double-clicking on a code, the PD is automatically opened to the spot with the coded quotation. If more than one quotation is associated with this code, a list pops up from which a quotation can be selected.

The Code Manager is frequently used to create and modify codes, to code data segments via drag & drop, and to retrieve coded data segments. It can also be used to sort your codes in multiple ways in order to analyze codebook evolution.

Similar tools are available to manage data segments ("quotations"), network views, code links, hyper links and relations.