Your first project

Create a new project

From the home screen, click the New Project button in the top right corner.

You will be asked to:

1. Name your project — choose a descriptive name so you can find it easily later.
2. Choose the output language — this sets the language used for category labels, summaries, and analysis results. Your source documents can be in any language — the language choice only defines the output.

The analysis purpose is optional guidance for some AI functionalities, and it is generally not needed. We know that the purpose of analysis can be ambiguous sometimes and change over time!

Upload your documents

Once you click "Save and Continue", you will be asked to upload your documents.

You can upload multiple documents at once. We support PDF, DOCX, RTF, and TXT files. If you need support for other file types, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Once you have uploaded your documents, you will be asked to confirm them. At this point, you spend your first credits. For most projects, these are the only credits required! You can run multiple analyses for free once you have created your project.

Choose your analysis type

Next, select the type of analysis for your project.

• Automatic Thematic Analysis — Skimle reads your documents and automatically discovers themes and categories.
• Predefined Categories — You define the categories upfront and Skimle sorts insights into them.
• Inductive Analysis — A bottom-up approach where categories emerge iteratively from the data.

For your first project, just choose the automatic thematic analysis. It creates a good structure based on the headings or questions in your documents. It is ideally suited for interview data.

The analysis can take a few minutes to complete, depending on the size of your documents. You will get an email with a link to the project when it is ready. In case the email goes to your junk folder, just check the Skimle home page after a while. Sometimes when we have several analyses running at the same time, your work may be queued for a while. The good news is, once the analysis is done, browsing the results is fast.

Explore your results

Once the analysis is complete, you can explore the results using several views:

• The spreadsheet view gives you an immediate overview of how insights are distributed across documents and categories.
• The categories view lets you navigate the category hierarchy and read AI-generated summaries.
• The document view shows the full text of a document with highlighted quotes.

You can also add metadata to your documents, use tags for cross-cutting classification, query your data with the AI chat, and export your results when you are ready to share them.