Coding
In NVivo, you can review your material and apply codes (keywords) to the text as you read. It is recommended to read through the material and code along the way, rather than defining the codes in advance. You can always change the names and merge codes later when you begin to see clear trends. It is also possible to organize the codes in a hierarchy. For more about coding, see NVivo's help pages:
Cases
Cases are people, places, organizations, events, or other entities that make up the units of analysis in your project and collect all the information about each individual unit. Not all projects need to use cases, but if you are interested in looking at aspects such as gender or age group in a group of people, it can be very useful. For more about cases, see NVivo's help pages:
Queries
Once you have coded your material, you can run queries to retrieve what has been coded, across all files. You can also use Queries to search for words that occur in your files, and much more. For more about queries, see NVivo's help pages:
Memos and annotations
NVivo offers several options for creating notes linked to the files you have imported.
Memos can be associated with a specific file or exist freely as a separate document. (Like a post-it note.) They can contain text, images, and tables and can be coded just like other files in NVivo.
Annotations are notes that are linked to specific parts of a file. (Similar to marginal notes.) You can annotate all file types, not just text.
For more about memos and annotations, see NVivo's help pages: