Last week, I gave a few tips for how to get more out of the browser which is built into every Accordance tool. Today I want to give you a glimpse into the real power the Browser offers.

Let’s say you want to search Jonathan Edwards’ Freedom of Will for the word “happiness.” It’s part of a compilation of Edwards’ works, and if you search the Content field of that entire module you get more than 1200 occurrences of “happiness”! What you need, therefore, is a way to restrict the search to Freedom of Will by itself.

BrowserRange To restrict your search to a portion of a tool, simply open the browser and option-click the desired section title. In this case, I’ll option-click the title Freedom of Will. A red bar will appear to the left of that title, and that highlight will remain visible no matter what sections of the browser I open or close. For example, if I click the triangle for Freedom of Will, all of its subsections will also have the red bar beside them. If I close the triangle for a higher level, such as Volume One, a light red bar will appear to indicate that some portion of Volume One (but not all of it) has been selected. Even if I close the browser completely, a red underline will remind me that a range has been set.

Once I’ve selected a portion of the tool to search, I need only click the Find button or Hit return to perform the new search. Now instead of more than 1200 hits, I get a much more manageable 44 hits.

When I’m ready to remove the range, I simply need to hold the option key and click on the vertical red bar to get rid of it.

This simple yet powerful feature has countless applications. You can use it to search one volume of a multi-volume commentary, a single church father in the massive Early Church Fathers collection, a specific issue of a magazine or journal, etc.