I’ve installed the new version of NVivo, which looks a whole lot better than the clunky old version I had before.

It still feels like a development version, though. Any researcher who worked with it for ten minutes would have given them a range of ideas for the Beta version.

Particularly the Help element. There’s next to no Help, except on fairly obvious points. So, after struggling against it for a whole day, I had to move on to the Tutorials. They’ve written these in QuickTime, although by the looks of them they used an earlier version known as Slowtime.

First… you click here………Now…. you double-click here……..Move your cursor over here (Yawn, did I fall asleep?)

And couldn’t they have programmed some key to mean Code? I don’t want to press esoteric key combos – I just want to code! (Grrr)

Still, at least it now imports Word files. Only problem is, due to my data going some way complicated FirstClass, Unix, Mac, PC route, it’s not quite a Word file but some mutant hybrid. (I can see the paragraph marks, you can see the paragraph marks, but can Find and Replace see the paragraph marks? No way.) 

And, boy, is it slow to open. Almost time to make a cup of tea while I’m waiting for it to crank its way into action.

Oh, and periodically it crashes and loses all your carefully constructed work.

Still, as I say, it’s a lot better than the old version.