As a writer, I have often known the mockery of the blank page. It glares at you, laughing at your struggles to fill it with something meaningful.

As Accordance users, we are constantly presented with a blank search box, ever ready to be put to use. Experienced users know exactly what to do with it, but new users may experience something of the mockery I feel when trying to fill a blank page. They may conceive of a search they would like to do, but how to construct it? They know Accordance is capable of much more than simple word and phrase searches, but how do they go about learning all the Boolean commands, wildcard symbols, and other tools that make such power-searching possible?

Thankfully, everything you need to fill in that blank search box—and I mean everything—is always readily available through one of the menus at the top of the screen. Can you guess which one?

As I'm sure you guessed, the aptly named Search menu presents you with everything you need to fill in the blank. Not sure what word to search for? Choose Enter Words…. Want to search a Bible with Key numbers for a particular key number? Choose Enter Key Numbers…. If your search text is a grammatically tagged Greek or Hebrew text, these menu items will appear as Enter Lexical Forms… and Enter Inflected Forms….

Beyond simply helping you enter words and key numbers, the Search menu also includes submenus listing every search command (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), every wildcard symbol, and (in the case of tagged texts) every grammatical and syntactical tag. You don't have to memorize these options or go digging through documentation even to realize they're available; just go to the Search menu and browse through the submenus. Not sure what a command or symbol does, but want to try it out? Simply select it from the menu to insert it into the search box.

By making all these options readily available, Accordance does its best to eliminate the potential mockery of the blank search box. And while there are still aspects of these commands and symbols which need to be learned, you always have them listed in a convenient place whenever you need them.

If you've never paid much attention to the Search menu, you now understand it's importance. Just remember to look there whenever you need help filling in the blank.

In yesterday's post, I began to show how you can use verse highlighting to "tag" verses with specific categories, topics, etc. In that post, I showed how to create a new Highlight File and define the styles which represent your "tags." Today, I want to show how to apply those styles to specific verses.

Once you've created a highlight style, applying it to a verse or a selection of words is easy: simply select the text you want to highlight, then click the desired style on the Highlight palette. To apply a highlight style to an entire verse, simply select some of the verse reference, then click the desired style. This is called verse highlighting, and it will appear in every Bible text you display which contains that verse.

If you select text in a portion of a verse and apply a style to it, that is called word highlighting. That highlighting will only show up in that particular Bible text, since other Bible texts may not have the exact same wording. In the screenshot below, you can see that I've applied one style to Psalm 146:1–2, and those verses appear highlighted in both the HCSBS and the KJVS. I've also applied a different style to the words "Do not trust in nobles" in Psalm 146:3 of the HCSB. Yet because this is word highlighting which is specific to that translation, this highlighting does not appear in the KJV.

If you select text across multiple verses and apply a highlight style, Accordance assumes you want to highlight all of the selected verses. In this way, you can very quickly "tag" large blocks of verses.

To clear a highlight style, simply select the highlighted verses or words, then click the Clear button on the Highlight palette.

We've now seen how to use highlight styles to "tag" verses with specific categories such as "Joy," "Encouragement," and "Worship." In my next post, I'll show how to hide all that highlighting when you don't care to see it, and how to find all the verses you've tagged with a certain style.

We got an interesting suggestion today on our User Forums. Someone asked for a way to "tag" verses with information. For example, he wrote, "I may want to add the tag 'Joy' to a verse that speaks 'joy' to me, but doesn't have that word actually in the verse."

While Accordance does not currently offer "tags" per se, one way to accomplish this right now is to use verse highlighting as a kind of tagging system.

To use Accordance's highlighting feature, the first thing you'll need to do is open the Highlight palette. You do this by selecting Highlight palette from the Window menu.

In most Accordance installations, the Highlight palette will open with one predefined set of Highlights (My Highlights) containing one predefined style (a yellow style named Important). You can then add more styles to that highlight set, or you can create a new set of highlights for a specific purpose. In this case, let's create a new set of highlights named Tags that we'll use for tagging verses.

To do that, choose New Highlight File… from the pop-up menu at the top of the Highlight palette. In the dialog box that appears, enter the name "Tags" and click OK. The Define Highlight Styles dialog box will then open automatically so you can define the various styles it will contain. Once again, the default style is a yellow highlight named Important, but we'll rename this first style Encouragement, change its Color to Cyan, and change its Shape from a thick bar to an underline.

As you can see, by changing the various pop-ups, you can create boxes, dashed lines, strikethroughs, etc. Once you have this first style set the way you want it, click the New button to add a second style. I'll call this second style Joy, select Magenta as the Color, and leave all the other pop-ups the same. Next I'll create a third style, call it Worship, and give it the color Purple. When I click OK to close the dialog box, my Highlight palette will now look like this:

I now have three "tags" that I can apply to the verses I read. In my next post, I'll show you how to apply those tag styles to individual verses.