How to define colors for codes and coding stripes in NVivo

Here we give an explanation of how you can define colours for your codes in NVivo. These colours can then also be made to correlate with the coding stripes. Coding stripes are colored bars that show you the codes that code the content you are viewing. All in all, this can make the navigation and visual analysis of the coding in your NVivo project much easier.

You can define colours for a number of different items in NVivo.
You can assign colours to:

• Files
• Codes
• Relationships
• Attribute values
• Users

Defining code colours

Start by defining colours for the codes you have. Right-click on any code and use the Color section in the popup menu to define a colour for the code.

Define coding stripes colour

Open the file, code, case or memo in the Detail View. On the ribbon tab for the item, click Coding Stripes and then choose an option (All, Most, Least Coding etc.).

When you display coding stripes, you can choose either automatic (show random system-generated colors) or item colors (show colors you have assigned to users or codes).

If you set the color scheme to item colors you can group the coding stripes by color—for example, if you have colored all codes that relate to environmental issues green, you might want to group all the green stripes together.

Setting the default value for NVivo Windows projects

Finally, you can define what should be used as the default for all projects when using NVivo for Windows. In NVivo click on the File tab and then on Options in the menu to the left. In the dialogue box (as shown in the picture below) choose the Display tab in the box. Next, you change the Default colour scheme to whatever choice you prefer, see picture below. This change will affect all projects you open in the future.