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Once your data is in Caplena, uploaded manually or via integration (Google, Amazon, Qualtrics, API, etc.), you’re ready to start your analysis.

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Overview panel

When you open your project, you’ll land on the Overview panel, where you can see the question designated for analysis and an AI-generated summary of key themes. Click “Start analysis now” to begin.
Overview panel

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Step 1: Choose how to start

Topic generation options
Start from scratch The AI automatically generates a topic structure based on your data. Best if you’re analyzing this type of feedback for the first time. Import existing topics\
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\ Reuse a topic collection you already have, either from a previous Caplena project or an Excel file.
  • Other project - Choose a previous project, select the relevant text column, and click “Inherit topic collection”. Ideal for recurring surveys (e.g. quarterly NPS, monthly product feedback) where consistency across waves matters.
  • Upload File - Import your own Excel-based topic collection. Your file must match one of these formats. With sentiment:
    Excel format with sentiment
    Without sentiment:
    Excel format without sentiment

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Step 2: Enable sentiment (optional)

Sentiment detection classifies the emotional tone of each response as positive, neutral, or negative. When enabled, a topic like Customer service splits into Customer service – positive and Customer service – negative, so you can see not just what people mention but how they feel about it.
Sentiment configuration
Turn it on if your data contains opinions or emotional responses — NPS comments, CSAT surveys, employee feedback:
“The support team was incredibly helpful.” → Customer Service – Positive “Waiting times were terrible.” → Customer Service – Negative
Skip it if your data is factual — feature requests, improvement suggestions, etc.:
“Add a dark mode option.” → No sentiment needed “Please include PDF export in the next update.” → No sentiment needed

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Step 3: Generate topics

Caplena generates a MECE topic collection, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, so topics cover all relevant feedback without overlap.
Initial topic collection The AI generates a draft collection of 20–60 topics grouped into categories, based on up to 20,000 rows of your data plus your project name, description, and question context. Each topic includes an auto-generated description you can edit.
Initial topic collection
You’ll also see:
  • Rare topics - not included by default, but available to browse and add manually
  • Similar topics - flagged for potential merging or removal
The AI tends to generate more topics than you need. Remove what’s irrelevant early, a leaner topic structure leads to cleaner results.
Prompt-based generation You can guide how topics are created using a custom prompt, useful when you want to focus on a specific theme or apply your own framework.
Prompt-based topic generation
ModeWhat it does
Regenerate full collectionRewrites the entire topic collection from scratch based on your prompt.
Generate new suggestionsAdds new suggestions on top of your existing collection without changing it.
Once you set a prompt it becomes your default, used when editing topics and when new rows are uploaded. You can override it anytime for a one-off run. When you’re happy with the topic collection, click Done. The AI will begin assigning topics within 1–2 minutes. Learn more about prompt-based generation →

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Step 4: Review and refine

How much manual tweaking you’ll need depends on which AI model you’re using: New AI — typically delivers human-level quality after the first run; only light adjustments needed. Learn more → Legacy AI — may require more hands-on review: merging overlaps, clarifying vague topics, adding missing ones. Learn more →
Last modified on June 9, 2026