As well as recording observations about passages within the text of a document, sometimes you may also wish to record facts or observations about a document as whole. Commonly, where documents are interviews, the attributes one might wish to record include known facts about the individual interviewed, such as their sex, age range or membership of a designated part of a sample. You may also wish to apply categories developed in the course of your analysis to documents. Document attributes can be used in conjunction with the search tools to examine the incidence of text marked by certain categories in particular types of documents.

This can be done by marking all the text of a document with a single category. To record an attribute of a document, create a category to represent the attribute. For example, if you wanted to be able to relate the words of interviewees with their sex, you might create a category "Sex", with two sub-categories "Male" and "Female" beneath it. To note that an interview was with a man,select the relevant category in the category tree, open the corresponding document, select all the text in the document - the shortcut CTRL+a is usually available - and click the Mark button.