Our Back to School sale has proven so popular we've decided to extend it until September 12. We've also expanded our easy payment plan by reducing the minimum purchase amount and letting you extend payments as much as 12 months. Times are tough, and those in ministry and academia often feel the effects the most, so we hope these incentives will be helpful to you.

Over the past few weeks I've been counting down the Top Ten Reasons you should plan to attend the Accordance User's Conference in the Dallas area September 24-25. Here again are reasons 4 through 10, along with reason 3. Remember, today is the last day to pre-register at a 30% discount!

10. Hang Out with Other Accordance Users: See here for more.

9. Get to Know Accordance Developers: See here for more.

8. Go Light or Heavy: See here for more.

7. Get Personal and Practical Help: See here for more.

6. Try Before You Buy and Buy at a Discount: See here for more.

5. Get Up Close and Personal with the New iOS App: See here for more.

4. Discuss the Future of Mobile with OakTree and Olive Tree: See here for more.

3. Get Inspired by World-Class Scholars: As I explained in the interview I did for the Fort Worth Evangelical Examiner, our goal for the Users' Conference is not just to offer Accordance training, but to inspire you to go deeper in your study of the Bible. Toward that end, we've enlisted the aid of two cutting-edge Bible Scholars who also happen to be gifted communicators (and Accordance users, of course): Dr. Martin Abegg and Dr. Daniel Wallace. Even those who don't happen to use Accordance will find the conference worth attending just to hear them speak!

Dr. Abegg is the Ben Zion Wacholder Professor of Dead Sea Scroll Studies at Trinity Western University. Although discovered in the 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls remained largely unpublished as late as the 1980s. A doctoral student at the time, Dr. Abegg was able to reconstruct the text of these unpublished scrolls from a concordance of words in the scrolls. The publication of his reconstructed texts helped open up scrolls research to a much wider body of scholars. In the 1990s, Dr. Abegg saw the potential for computerized study of the scrolls and partnered with Accordance to develop electronic texts of the various Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts. He will give a presentation on the relationship of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, and will be present during the entire conference for anyone who would like to meet with him.

Dr. Wallace is Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and has written one of the standard textbooks on New Testament Greek: Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. (Available as an Accordance module, of course!) As the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, Dr. Wallace has led expeditions throughout Europe and the Middle East in search of New Testament manuscripts. He will give a presentation describing the Center’s work of discovering and photographing New Testament manuscripts in order to further New Testament textual criticism.

As I said, both of these men are extremely effective at talking about their scholarly interests in a way "the rest of us" can easily understand. You won't want to miss the chance to hear them speak and get to know them personally.

We've now covered eight of our top ten reasons to attend the Users' Conference. Look for the last two reasons to attend in an upcoming post, and be sure to pre-register today.

Dr. J has just done a new Lighting the Lamp podcast on the recently-released NIV Application Commentary series (NIVAC). In it, Dr. J shows how NIVAC is distinct from other commentaries and examines NIVAC's take on five different passages. This podcast can help you make an informed purchasing decision. Just be sure you make it before the introductory sale ends!

Over the past few weeks I've been counting down the Top Ten Reasons you should plan to attend the Accordance User's Conference in the Dallas area September 24-25. Here again are reasons 6 through 10, along with reasons 4 and 5. Take note, iPhone and iPad users, these latest two are for you:

10. Hang Out with Other Accordance Users: See here for more.

9. Get to Know Accordance Developers: See here for more.

8. Go Light or Heavy: See here for more.

7. Get Personal and Practical Help: See here for more.

6. Try Before You Buy and Buy at a Discount: See here for more.

5. Get Up Close and Personal with the New iOS App: As I mentioned in yesterday's post and in the interview I did for the Fort Worth Evangelical Examiner (henceforth FWEE), the Users' Conference will be the ideal place to learn about Accordance for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Not only will we be showing off what it can do, but you'll get to meet and talk to the programmer responsible for it. After you thank him profusely for all his efforts and lost sleep, you can be among the first to offer feedback and help shape the app's future direction. How cool is that?

4. Discuss the Future of Mobile with OakTree and Olive Tree: As I explain in the FWEE interview, our goals for the Users' Conference are much broader than just training you how to use Accordance. Among other things, we hope to spark discussions about how to study the Bible in general and how to use technology to do it more effectively. Toward that end, we've scheduled a panel discussion about "The Impact and Future of Mobile Bible Software" and we've enlisted the help of our good friends at Olive Tree Bible Software.

Olive Tree is one of the leading developers of Bible Software for handheld devices and their Bible Reader app for iPhone and iPad consistently receives rave reviews. They've been developing for a dizzying array of handhelds for a long time, so they've seen it all and have a much broader perspective on handheld computing than we do. We're therefore very excited to have them lend their expertise to the discussion.

Beyond that, many Accordance users are also Bible Reader users, so we expect many of you will be interested to meet developers from both companies, learn how both apps can be used to complement each other, and hear the direction each developer is planning to go in the future. Next to hearing our keynote speakers, I'm personally most excited about this handheld Bible study panel. Can you tell?

We've now covered seven of our top ten reasons to attend the Users' Conference. Look for the last three reasons to attend in upcoming posts, and be sure to pre-register before the end of this month.

The Fort Worth Evangelical Examiner has posted an interview with yours truly about the upcoming Accordance Users' Conference in the Dallas area. Be sure to check it out!

I used to work at a large church where Mondays were basically one long series of meetings. We'd have a general staff meeting first thing in the morning, then break off into meetings with other members of our respective ministry departments, and in the afternoon we would plan the weekly worship meeting. Some of these meetings—such as the worship planning meeting—were creative and fun, but the cumulative effect of all these meetings was tiring and even a little discouraging. At the end of the day, you felt like you had come away with a long list of to-dos without having gotten any of them accomplished. No matter how good your work environment, you likely feel the same way about meetings: yes, you recognize that they may be necessary, but they often feel tedious and counter-productive.

On the whole, my work for Accordance doesn't require a lot of meetings. In a company where most of the development staff works from home, you tend to call meetings only when they are absolutely necessary. But these days, I've been in a lot of meetings, and frankly, I'm lovin' every minute of it. That's because these meetings have been about things like our new iPhone/iPad app and the next major upgrade to Accordance, both of which are feverishly being worked on right now. I'm loving these meetings because I get to see the latest developments, give my feedback, make suggestions, and see us come to a consensus which is more exciting than anything I would have dreamed up on my own. There are so many cool things in the works right now that I love being kept in the loop through these meetings.

Of course, the tough part about being involved in all these discussions is that I then get very impatient to see all our plans implemented and to play with all the new goodies. Those who read my blogs and tweets about upcoming developments complain that I'm teasing them. But I actually feel that same fevered anticipation even though—or rather, because—I already know what's coming.

What's more, I get impatient to tell you about all the cool stuff we're working on. But because we know better than to talk too much about stuff that's still in development (and therefore subject to last-minute changes), I have to bite my lip and keep quiet . . . for now.

Of course, if you can catch one of us in person, we have been known to give sneak peeks at stuff that's in the works. So if you're dying to be in the know, be sure to look for us at upcoming conferences, seminars, and of course, the Users' Conference. I promise, you'll love being at those meetings.

Whenever I do a training seminar, I'm surprised to see long-time Accordance users still getting the copyright info for each new module they open, or a save warning for each window or tab they close. If you use Accordance the way I do, you're constantly opening resources, looking up information, then closing them again. You don't want to be hassled with all those warning messages and temporary windows, do you?

If you haven't discovered that you can turn those things off yet, go to Preferences right now and select General Settings. At the top of the dialog box you'll see the following options:

Look at all the items in the Information section. By clicking a checkbox, you can suppress the initial Accordance splash screen. Attractive as it is, having it appear each time you launch Accordance takes time. By turning it off, you'll save a second or two each time Accordance opens. You can also suppress the copyright info and save warnings I mentioned above, as well as information tips which appear to offer help in how to use certain features. Since the information tips don't appear very often and are not terribly intrusive, I leave this box unchecked, but you can turn them off if you don't want them.

In addition to suppressing information windows and dialogs which can interrupt your workflow, the General settings also let you determine how you want Accordance to open. In the Startup section, you can choose whether you want Accordance to start with a Default Search window, with a custom window arrangement you set up and save as the "Default Session," or with the "Last Session." Starting up with the Last Session means Accordance will save whatever is open when you quit Accordance and reopen with the same window arrangement the next time you launch Accordance.

If you haven't yet discovered these settings, you owe it to yourself to explore the numerous options in the Accordance Preferences. By the way, if you're not quite sure what a particular option is for, just click the question mark at the bottom right corner of the Preferences dialog. Accordance Help will open to tell you exactly what that option is for.

Over the past few weeks I've been counting down the Top Ten Reasons you should plan to attend the Accordance Users' Conference in the Dallas area September 24-25. Here again are reasons 8, 9, and 10, along with reasons 6 and 7:

10. Hang Out with Other Accordance Users: See here for more.

9. Get to Know Accordance Developers: See here for more.

8. Go Light or Heavy: See here for more.

7. Get Personal and Practical Help: I mentioned this in passing in my previous post about the Users' Conference, but the user's conference is designed to give more personalized help than is possible with our more lecture-oriented training seminars. We want you to come in and tell us how you study the Bible, about your sermon prep workflow, and how you're researching your dissertation. We want you to bring us the projects you're working on and ask how you can better utilize Accordance to accomplish your goals. There's no way we can do that in a seminar, but the workshops and extended break times are designed to give you that opportunity in abundance.

6. Try Before You Buy and Buy at a Discount: Accordance offers an incredible library of resources, such as huge commentary sets (Word, Hermeneia, NIGTC, NAC, NIVAC, etc.) and original language resources found nowhere else (Göttingen Septuagint, CNTTS Apparatus, Qumran Biblical Manuscripts, etc.). Some of these resources represent a substantial investment, and you naturally want to be sure you'll use them before you plunk down your hard-earned cash. If you're mulling over a major purchase, the User's Conference will give you the chance to grab an Accordance staff member and say, "What's all the fuss about Göttingen about?" Or perhaps you'll want to ask other users, "What commentaries do you prefer?" Check things out until you know exactly what you'll be getting, and when you're ready to make a purchase, you'll be able to take advantage of substantial conference discounts.

We're now halfway through our top ten reasons to attend the Users' Conference. Look for even better reasons to attend in upcoming posts, and be sure to pre-register before the end of this month.

A few weeks ago, I made the claim that whenever you ask us if you can do something using Accordance, we're usually able to answer with a simple and straightforward, "Yes you can!". Not long after that, I backed that up by answering "Yes you can" to a specific challenge. A few days ago, someone posted the following question in response to that second post.

Thanks, David. This has inspired me to play around a bit with the analysis window and its options.

Is there a way to see words from a particular pericope listed in order of the frequency with which they occur in the whole NT? For instance, could one get a list of the words in Col 1:1-14 from the most rare (in the NT, not in the pericope) to the most frequently occurring? I can't quite figure out how to automate this in Accordance.

Wait for it: . . . Yes you can! And of course, it's easy to do. Here's how:

The first thing we need to do is find every word in Colossians 1:1-14. I'll be doing the search in the tagged Greek New Testament (GNT-T), but you can do it in an English translation as well. To search for every word in a passage, simply click the Words button, enter the asterisk wildcard (*) to represent any word, then use the AND and RANGE commands to limit your search to a particular passage. Both the AND and RANGE commands are listed in the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu, or you can use the keyboard shortcuts shift-command-A and shift-command-R. Your search argument should then look like this:

After doing this search, every word in Colossians 1:1-14 will be highlighted. What is the point in that? Well, having found every word, you can now analyze the words that were found or even use them as the basis of another search.

If you click the Details button and look at the Analysis tab, you'll see a listing of every word that was found and the number of times it appears. To sort these from least frequent to most frequent, simply choose Count Up from the Sort pop-up menu. Your analysis should look like this:

This is close to what the user requested, except that she wanted to see the words listed according to their frequency in the entire New Testament rather than just the passage in question. What's the difference? Well, as you can see here, the word αγαθος ("good") is only used one time in Colossians 1:1-14. Yet αγαθος is hardly a "rare" word in the Greek New Testament. To see which of these words is least common in the Greek New Testament, we will have to do a new search for each of these words in the entire New Testament!

Thankfully, we don't have to search for each of the 95 different words in Colossians 1:1-14 separately. Instead, we can use the entire list of words as the basis of a new search. To do that, duplicate the existing Search window by using the keyboard shortcut command-D. Hit the tab key once to select the entire contents of the argument entry box, then select HITS from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu (or use the keyboard shortcut shift-command-H). If you only have the two tabs I'm describing, when you enter the HITS command, it should automatically insert the name of the tab containing your first search. If you have additional search tabs open, a dialog box will appear asking which tab's "hits" you want to use.

What does the HITS command do? As its name suggests, it lets you use all the "hits" (that is, found words) from another search as an argument in a new search. In this case, we're searching for every occurrence of each word found in Colossians 1:1-14, but since we've set no range for this search, we'll now find those words throughout the entire GNT.

When we click the Details button and look at the Analysis tab of this search, we can now Count Up to focus on the truly unusual words in Colossians 1:1-14.

While I've taken a long time to explain all this, performing this search and getting the analysis actually takes no more than a few mouse clicks. The trick is knowing that the HITS command lets you use the hits from one search as the basis for another. Learn to use the HITS command, and you'll discover many more "Can I?" questions for which the answer is . . . say it with me . . . "Yes you can!"

Ever seen an episode of Man vs. Wild? Survival expert Bear Grylls gets dropped into the middle of the Everglades or the Arctic tundra and shows you how to survive if you're ever in a similar situation. Grylls won't just tell you which frogs are poisonous and which are good eating, he'll SHOW you by eating one himself!

Well there's one survival situation I doubt even Grylls would know how to handle: a seminary education. Anyone who has ever been dropped in the middle of that wild and woolly world will understand immediately how hard it can be to survive. You have to learn not one but two ancient languages (maybe even more!). Each professor assigns reading material with apparent disregard of the fact that you're taking other classes at the same time. In the span of three or four years, you're expected to become a careful exegete, an expert theologian, a gifted communicator, and a compassionate counselor. Good luck!

Survivalists like Grylls know a good knife and the ability to start a fire are essential to surviving in the wild. Savvy students like you know that Accordance is essential for seminary survival. Now we want you to show your fellow seminarians why that is. Send us your own video documentary explaining how Accordance is essential to your own seminary survival, and you can earn a gift certificate toward your next Accordance purchase or $250.00 worth of Accordance products.

While we've aimed this contest at seminary students, there's no reason you pastors and profs can't enter as well. You'll find details on how to enter here. Get creative, have fun with it, and please, don't eat any frogs!