Question 1

What can I do in Byleron QDA?

Accepted Answer

Byleron QDA brings source management, manual coding, memos, multimedia transcripts, analysis, AI-assisted review, and results preparation into one research project. You can work with different file types without creating a separate analysis environment for each format. Codes, evidence, document metadata, and memos remain connected as you move from reading to analysis and reporting.

Question 2

How do I create and prepare my first project?

Accepted Answer

Select “+ New,” give the project a clear title, and add a short description of what the study examines. Project Guidance can hold the research aim, questions, study context, method, key concepts, evidence preference, audience, and language choices. This context helps you work consistently and gives the AI Assistant appropriate framing without treating project notes as evidence.

Question 3

What is the Demo project for?

Accepted Answer

Demo opens your own Shared Spaces practice project with text, Word, Excel, PDF, images, audio, video, coded evidence and memos. You can change coding and memos, but its source materials are fixed. It does not use a research-project slot. Add your own files to a research project. AI and paid features still follow your plan.

Question 4

What workflow should I follow for a new study?

Accepted Answer

Begin by checking source quality and clarifying the research question. Read a meaningful sample, create provisional codes, define them, and revise the hierarchy before coding the full corpus. Write memos when your interpretation changes. After coding, inspect evidence and patterns rather than relying on frequencies alone. Add only defensible tables, figures, and quotations to Results Builder.

Question 5

How should I choose a qualitative method before starting?

Accepted Answer

Choose the method from the research question, epistemological position, source material, and reporting expectations—not from a software feature. The detailed methods guides explain how Byleron QDA can support content analysis, thematic analysis, codebook and template analysis, framework analysis, comparative work, and visual or multimodal workflows while keeping the methodological decisions with the researcher.

Question 6

What does “Byleron QDA” mean?

Accepted Answer

QDA stands for qualitative data analysis. Byleron QDA is a browser-based environment for organizing sources, coding evidence, writing memos, examining analytical patterns, and preparing traceable results for qualitative research.

Question 7

How do I create, select, rename, or delete a project?

Accepted Answer

Select + New, enter a distinctive project title, and create the project. A newly created project becomes the active project. Use the project list to move between studies and the project edit controls to rename or delete one. Each project has its own files, codebook, coding, metadata, memos, Analysis state, and Results Builder draft.

Question 8

Why should I complete Project Guidance, and what belongs in each field?

Accepted Answer

Project Guidance records the analytical frame used throughout the study. The description states what the project is about; the aim states what the study seeks to understand; research questions define the inquiry; context identifies the setting and participants; method and analytic approach describe how material will be interpreted; key concepts identify sensitizing ideas; writing style, interpretation level, evidence preference, audience, and language guide later assistance and reporting.

Question 9

Which qualitative methods can Byleron QDA support?

Accepted Answer

Byleron QDA supports researchers conducting coding-based qualitative work across text, documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, audio, and video. Its strongest fit is qualitative content analysis, thematic analysis, codebook or template analysis, framework analysis, comparative and cross-case analysis, document analysis, visual qualitative analysis, and multisource or multimodal analysis. It can also help organize work associated with grounded theory, narrative, discourse, phenomenological, and conversation-oriented approaches, but those methods require methodological decisions and close researcher interpretation that software cannot automate.

Question 10

How can I conduct content analysis or thematic analysis in Byleron QDA?

Accepted Answer

For qualitative content analysis, code meaningful segments into defined categories and systematically compare the resulting evidence. Categories may be deductive, inductive, or mixed. For thematic analysis, use coding as a step toward developing, reviewing, defining, and interpreting broader themes; a list of generated codes alone is not a completed thematic analysis. Byleron QDA supports both workflows through precise coding, code hierarchies, code definitions, memos, evidence retrieval, comparative views, and editable reporting.

Question 11

How can I use codebook, framework, and comparative analysis workflows?

Accepted Answer

Codebook or template analysis begins with an initial set of concepts, applies it consistently, and revises definitions, boundaries, and hierarchy as the study develops. Framework analysis adds systematic charting across cases and domains. Comparative and cross-case analysis examines similarities, differences, convergence, and divergence across selected documents, interview questions, cases, or meaningful metadata groups. Byleron QDA supports these workflows through code definitions, parent/subcode structures, retrieved evidence, metadata-aware comparisons, question-organized comparative coding, and Results Builder tables and figures.

Question 12

How can I analyze images, audio, video, and multiple source types?

Accepted Answer

Use visual content analysis to code visible features in images, drawings, scanned material, or video frames; use visual thematic analysis when interpreting broader meaning patterns. Audio and video can be transcribed for textual analysis while retaining timestamps or coded ranges that link findings back to the original media. A multisource or multimodal workflow can bring together an interview, drawing, observation, photograph, or recording for the same case and examine convergence, complementarity, discrepancy, or absence across sources.

Question 13

What are the first steps in a new project?

Accepted Answer

A first project takes about ten steps, in this order. You can stop after any step and come back, because everything is saved with the project. If you would like to practise first, open the Sample project instead.

Question 14

How do I pick up where I left off?

Accepted Answer

Open Analysis → Overview. On the Summary tab, the Last coded line names the file you coded most recently, with the date and time. Click it to open that exact evidence: a text passage, an image or PDF region, a video frame, or an audio or video range. The Activity tab lists your latest actions; View all activity shows the complete list.

Question 15

Where can I look up what a term means?

Accepted Answer

The Dictionary page gives a plain-language meaning for the concepts used in qualitative analysis and in Byleron QDA, such as code, memo, case, saturation, Cohen's kappa and Retrieved Evidence. You can search it, filter by topic, or jump to a letter. Each entry lists related terms and links to the Help Center questions that explain how to use the idea. In this Help Center, each answer shows a Terms in this answer line linking back to the Dictionary.

Question 16

What do the small icons next to a code mean?

Accepted Answer

Every code in the code list has a row of small icon buttons. Hover an icon to see its name. From left to right they add a sub-code, edit the code (name, colour and definition), merge it into another code, split it into several codes, add or open its memo, and delete it. The triangle at the start of the row opens or closes the sub-codes. The same code actions are also available above Retrieved Evidence when you open a code in Analysis.

Question 17

How do I take the guided demo tour?

Accepted Answer

Open Demo in the workspace and choose Start tour. The tour uses synthetic research materials and does not change your own research projects. It guides you through Project Details, materials, codes, coding, evidence and memos, Analysis, AI assistance and Results Builder.

Question 18

Can the app suggest values for my Project Details?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but only where your project already shows the answer. When you open Edit project details, a field can show a suggestion with the reason for it, for example that AI was used because you ran AI tasks, that recordings were transcribed, that more than one person coded, or the language of your sources. Choose Use this to fill the field or Not now to leave it. Nothing is filled without your click.

Question 19

Which file types can I analyze?

Accepted Answer

You can work with plain text, DOCX documents, PDF files, XLSX spreadsheets, common image formats, audio, and video. The available coding tools adapt to the material: text selections for machine-readable text, rectangular regions for visual material, transcript selections for recorded speech, and time or frame ranges for media. Under “+ File” the Text file option also lets you add plain text files.

Question 20

How should I prepare an XLSX interview or survey file?

Accepted Answer

Use a clear header row. Put participant or case identifiers and demographic information in metadata columns, and place each interview question or open-ended survey question in its own response column. Consistent question headings allow comparing documents with AI and question-based Chat with Data to group answers correctly.

Question 21

What happens when I import a DOCX document?

Accepted Answer

The workspace extracts a stable text representation for reading, searching, coding, and project exchange. Headings and paragraphs are retained where possible, but the workspace is not a word processor and does not reproduce every page-layout or styling detail from Microsoft Word.

Question 22

How do text coding and region coding work in PDFs?

Accepted Answer

Use text coding when the PDF contains a reliable machine-readable text layer. Select the exact words you need and assign codes or memos. Use Draw Region for photographs, charts, handwriting, scanned passages, complex layouts, or any visual area that should be analyzed as an image. Both forms of evidence remain part of the same project and can appear in Analysis and Results Builder.

Question 23

Why can’t I select text in a PDF?

Accepted Answer

The PDF may contain only scanned page images, may have a damaged or inaccurate text layer, or may restrict text access. You can still code rectangular page regions. If you need searching, exact quotations, or text-based AI assistance, run OCR in a trusted document-processing application, verify the recognized text, and then import the corrected PDF.

Question 24

What should I do when a file will not open or display correctly?

Accepted Answer

First confirm that the original file opens normally on your computer and is not password-protected or damaged. Then check the extension, file size, and browser compatibility. Re-exporting the source to a standard DOCX, PDF, XLSX, PNG, MP3, MP4, or plain-text format often resolves unusual encoding or codec problems.

Question 25

How many files can I add, and why do large files take time to process?

Accepted Answer

The number of files allowed per project depends on your plan (see “How do the plan limits compare?”). Large PDFs, high-resolution images, and long audio or video files take longer to import and prepare because the workspace extracts text, generates previews, or transcribes the recording before it becomes codeable.

Question 26

How do I crop an image or reselect a coded region?

Accepted Answer

Use Crop image before coding: select an area on the full image, preview it, then save to replace the working image. Cancel leaves it unchanged. Remove all existing coded regions before cropping because their positions would change. Copies used by other projects are preserved. To adjust existing coding, choose Reselect region in its coding dialog, make the selection on the full image, then save the coding change.

Question 27

How does coding work for each file type?

Accepted Answer

Byleron QDA codes each kind of material in the way that fits it. You can add plain text files (TXT, MD, RTF, HTML), subtitle files (SRT, VTT), Word documents (DOCX), PDF files, spreadsheets (XLSX), images (PNG, JPG, WEBP), audio (MP3, WAV, M4A, AAC) and video (MP4, MOV, WEBM, M4V). All of them end up in the same project, so one code can gather evidence from text, images and recordings together.

Question 28

How do I create a useful codebook?

Accepted Answer

Create concise labels that represent analytically meaningful ideas, not entire questions or vague topics. Add a definition explaining what the code means, inclusion guidance describing when it applies, and exclusion guidance distinguishing it from nearby concepts. Use parent codes for broader analytic domains and subcodes for distinct meanings within them.

Question 29

How do I code a text selection?

Accepted Answer

Select the smallest passage that preserves the meaning you need, then choose Assign Code to Selection. You can assign one or several existing codes, create a code, or attach a memo. The evidence preview should match the selected words before you finish.

Question 30

How do I correct a coded selection or evidence range?

Accepted Answer

Open the coded segment and choose Adjust Range or Adjust Evidence. Expand or reduce the selection so it contains the intended meaning, then save it. The codes and memos remain connected to the corrected evidence.

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