Susan, I love this posting! You taught me to do this process about …8 (?) years ago and I still use it. I taught a modified version to my students at Regis University.
I find it useful to actually write keywords in the code column. Sometimes I’ll add a 2nd column for sub-codes. For example, I interviewed 10 people on a team about their experience during the first year of a project. One of my codes was “1st Year” with the sub-code “We made it!” Another code was “1st Year” with the sub-code “Really hard!”
When my numbers are small enough (e.g. I asked 10 people 7 questions) I’ll sometimes make just one spreadsheet and simply add a column to indicate Question #. That way, if people bring up a particular issue across several questions, I can structure the report by themes (i.e. codes) rather than by questions. For example, for one report, “technology was a challenge” showed up as a theme, and different people brought it up in their answers to different questions.
One thing I like about this method is that it’s really easy to spot whether 7 people commented on a certain topic or whether one person commented 7 times in different ways. :)
As you said, getting Word text into Excel can be interesting. Sometimes simply hitting “enter” at the end of each meaning unit (I like that language by the way) in Word, then “converting text to table,” then pasting it into Excel makes things easier.
I wish I could have seen your presentation in person. I would have wanted to hear more about Organizing vs. Analyzing, and also about the 5 kinds of codes. Maybe someday!
OK, I think that’s all for now. Thank you so much for your blog!