A project is a collection of related text documents stored in a single file together with observations, insights and notes relating to those documents.

The units of textual data that are imported into the project for analysis. Documents may be annotated with editable memos. However, once imported, a document's text cannot be altered. This is a temporary limitation rather than a deliberate feature.

An analytic theme, idea, variable, whatever, that attempts to describe certain passages of the text data. These are sometimes referred to as "codes" in the literature, and in other packages. Categories can be organised in a hierarchical pattern, and can have editable memos associated with them.

A user records the connection between a category and a passage of text by "marking" the document section with the category. In the sociological methods literature, this procedure is often called "coding" a document. Marked or coded text can be retrieved subsequently for comparison and review.