By far my biggest gripe with NVivo is its closed-ness. Its file formats are opaque, it provides almost no ability to import or export structured data, and your ability to access your own data depends on your continuing to renew your license. Most significantly, NVivo's lack of an API means that you are locked into its clunky GUI - fine for getting started but totally inadequate for managing large volumes of data.

This gap frustrated me so much that I deciphered NVivo's file formats and wrote Python scripts to convert to and from a simple SQLite database. While not quite a full-blown API, this does already allow you to write your own scripts in your favorite scripting language to do such things as import, analyze, report on and archive data. If you are interested, take a look at https://github.com/BarraQDA/nvivotools

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