FAQ

First, please check your spam or junk folders. Sometimes activation code and license file emails end up there. All orders are processed manually to ensure accuracy. You should normally receive your activation code and license file by email within 24 hours. If you didn’t receive these after 24 hours, please contact us.

To install the software, please follow the instructions below:

1. Download the software from our website to your computer
   https://provalisresearch.com/downloads/trial-versions/
2. Copy and paste your license file on the desktop of your computer
3. Run the software
4. Enter your activation code
5. Enter a new password

For more information, see the video Registering and activating the software

A single-user license can be installed on two computers (e.g. 1 laptop and 1 desktop) but you cannot run the program at the same time on both machines.

In order to transfer your license file, please follow the instructions below:

1. Deactivate your software from the menu «Help» then «Deactivate»
2. Uninstall the software from your old computer
3. Download the software from our website in your new computer:
    You should download the same version as your actual software
4. Copy and paste your license file on the desktop of your new computer
5. Run the software.
6. Enter your activation code
7. Enter your old password and then select a new one. You need to choose a new password that has never been used before to activate this specific license.

There is no limit to the number of documents per se. We have seen projects with hundreds of thousands of cases, each containing a short document. There is however a theoretical limit of 2 billion documents; the actual limit corresponds to the amount of available disk space. A single project can thus take tens of several gigabits of hard disk space.

The short answer is yes. Most PDF files can easily be imported directly with all text formatting and optionally, with the images. PDF documents are converted into editable documents, storing them in rich-text format, just like any other document file type supported by QDA Miner. The conversion engine has been carefully designed to remove hyphens and unnecessary carriage returns, adjust the text flow in multi-column documents, and import tables and images correctly.

Despite advanced importation features, some PDF documents may still not be imported properly. Some PDF files consist of scanned images of the original document and contain no text at all. These can be easily recognized by the fact that it is not possible to select any text segment or that text searches never return any hits. Other documents may have quite complex layout designs, making their proper importation quite difficult. For those documents, we recommend pre-processing them with full-fledged OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software like Abbyy’s FineReader or Nuance’s OmniPage or by some PDF to Word conversion tools like PDF Transformer by Abbyy. Although the latest version of Acrobat Professional does include some OCR features, its performance was deemed not good enough to preserve the document structure.

We also recommend removing images or scaling down the graphic resolution of images to the lowest setting because images will significantly increase the resulting document size and will slow down the browsing and text-processing speed of QDA Miner and WordStat.

Yes, we offer technical support by telephone and email. We answer all inquiries within one business day. Before contacting Support please make sure you are using the most updated version for the license with which you are registered. We regularly make updates and an issue may already have been remedied in an update. For technical support you can email us at

There are many ways to receive training. We provide training online and in person. We hold regular training workshops at our offices throughout the year. We are available to conduct training sessions for large and small groups at your business or institution. You can inquire about prices, availability, and book online training for individuals or groups by contacting us at . We also have a list of trainers hosted on the training section of our website Trainers web page. We have a selection of tutorial videos for QDA Miner and WordStat Tutorial videos. We regularly hold Free webinars on different aspects of our software. You can watch recorded versions of the webinars here Recorded webinars.

We provide regular updates of the current versions of QDA Miner and WordStat. You can download the updates on our website at Updates web page.

We release upgrades at least once a year (eg.WordStat 2022) We often add new features and improvements during the year. All upgrades are included with one-year and three-year leases of our software.

We have licenses priced for academics, governments/NGOs, and commercial operations. You can see the different prices by going to the order section of our website. There is also a Free, limited version of the software, QDA Miner Lite. You can see the features of QDA Miner Lite and how it compares with the paid version of the software by going to the QDA Miner Lite web page.

We provide a 14-day trial version of the software. You can download it here.

QDA Miner and WordStat will run on a Mac OS computer using the Intel chip (pre-Nov. 2020) with Parallels, Boot Camp, Virtual Box, CrossOver, or other Windows emulation tools. The software will also run on Linux computers using CrossOver or Wine. For more information click here. For Mac OS using the ARM-M1 chip (2020 going forward) the situation is a bit more complicated. Provalis Software will run on Mac OS using Parallels 16. We are continuing to explore more options and are in discussions with different utility software providers. For more information see our Blog.

The answer is yes. We have written a detailed Blog explaining the different options.

If you are using a PC and updating to Windows 11 this may impact the Machine ID recognized by WordStat or QDA Miner and will trigger a re-activation of the User’s application the first time you run Provalis software after the update to Windows 11. The remedy is simple and straightforward. You just have to reactivate the software.

You can see more information on our Blog, Update to Windows 11 and Provalis Research software