When searching an Accordance Tool module, you may get results which are buried deep within a long article. When that happens, how can you see the wider context of where you are in the tool?

For example, let's say I search the Titles field of the Holman Bible Dictionary for the word "judges." Here's the first result I get:

This is obviously a subarticle within a much larger article, but how can I find out which one? I could obviously scroll back until I got to the beginning of the article, but if it's a very long article, that's not particularly practical.

So here's the trick: if you hold the option key down while clicking the Table of Contents icon, the Contents browser will open and automatically drill down through all the higher levels of the current article, enabling me to see immediately that this is a subarticle of "Israel, Land of."

If I decide that's not what I'm looking for and I click the down Mark arrow to examine other occurrences of the word "judges," I'll eventually come to an article under the alphabetical heading "K."

The option-click trick works here as well. I need only option-click the disclosure triangle next to the letter K to have Accordance drill down and show that the current subarticle belongs to the article "King, Kingship."

Using this trick enables you to see from the surrounding context whether a search result is what you're looking for, which is a lot faster than reading each article or scrolling back to its beginning.

Picture this: you open Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary and want to go to the main article on David. You could search the Entry field for the word "David," but that would give you every article and subarticle which mentions David. You would then have to hit the down Mark arrow a half-dozen times to jump to the main article on David.

A much simpler approach is not to do a search at all, but to use the Go To box in the bottom right corner of the Tool tab. Simply enter "David" in that box and hit Return to navigate to the article which begins with the word David.

How well entering something in the Go To box will take you to your desired article depends to some extent on the contents of the tool, but for dictionaries like Anchor which tend to have standard articles, this approach works really well.

On Monday, I showed you some tricks for seeing more than one Scripture link in a tool at the same time. Today, I want to show how you can specify which Bible text displays when you hover over or click on a Scripture link in an Accordance tool.

For example, let's say your default Bible is an English translation, but you want the links in BDAG to go to the Greek New Testament rather than an English translation. If they're Old Testament references, you want those to go to the Greek Septuagint. Is that even possible?

This is Accordance we're talking about: of course it's possible. To do this, simply open up BDAG and use the one keyboard shorcut every Accordance user must learn: command-T.

As I've explained before, command-T opens the Display settings for nearly every kind of window in Accordance. If you do that from a tool like BDAG, you'll get this dialog box:

As you can see, this dialog lets me set the font, style, and other aspects of BDAG's appearance. It also lets me customize the way hypertext links are handled. If I wanted links to appear in Burgundy italic instead of Blue underline, I could do that here. I can also specify the text and alternate text any Scripture links should display. The alternate text will only be used if the primary text does not contain the verses a link references. In this case, since I set my primary text to GNT-T and my alternate text to LXX1, any New Testament references will display the primary text, and any Old Testament references will use the alternate text.

It's as simple as that! If I want this change to be temporary, I can just click OK and these texts will be used as long as the current BDAG window remains open. Any other BDAG window I open would still use the default settings. If I want to make this change the default setting for BDAG, then I would click the Use as Default button before I click OK to close the dialog.

In describing his workflow, Pastor Levi Durfey mentioned a feature he uses to explore cross-references to a passage. It's a little known feature, and there is another related to it, so I want to go over Scripture links in detail.

Of course, you all know that when you're looking at a series of Scripture links in a tool, you can hover over each one to see it in the Instant Details box, or you can click the link to open the passage in a separate window. But what if you want to see all the cross-references in a separate window? Do you have to click each link in turn? Of course not. This is Accordance!

If you simply hold down the command-key while clicking any Scripture link, every link in the paragraph will automatically be opened in a text window. So if you're looking at a cross-reference tool, command-clicking any of the cross-references will show you all of them. Or if you're looking at a dictionary, command-clicking one reference will show all the references in that paragraph.

Now, what if you want to view more than one link, but not all the links? Say you're looking at an article in BDAG that lists a string of five references as examples of a given usage. You want to see those five references without the noise of all the other references in the paragraph (which may refer to other usages). To do that, simply drag a selection from some point inside the first Scripture link to some point inside the last link you want. Like this:

As long as you start and end your selection inside different links, all the Scripture links inside the selection will be opened in a text window. This is the tip Pastor Durfey mentioned as one of his favorite features.

Learn these two simple tricks—command-clicking a Scripture link and selecting multiple links—and you'll be able to see exactly the verses you want to see.

Accordance offers a lot of commentaries, and their number is growing all the time. Some commentaries cover a single book, some an entire testament or the whole Bible, and some an odd assortment of books. Series like Pillar, MacArthur, NIGTC, etc. are missing volumes that have not yet been published, and it's hard to remember which of these commentaries includes a volume on Ephesians. Accordance makes it easy to jump from the text of the Bible to a commentary, but how do you know which commentary will have something on that passage?

The simplest way to find out is to select the reference for the passage you're working in, then choose the group of modules you want to search for that verse. For example, if I'm looking at Ephesians 2:10, I can simply double-click the reference to select it. Then I'll click the Search button of the Resource palette and choose the group of modules I want to search. If I haven't created any of my own custom search groups, I would just choose [All Tools], but since I've already created a group containing all my commentaries, I'll choose that.

A Search All window will now open listing every commentary which cites Ephesians 2:10. The default sort order of Importance will place every commentary which has Ephesians 2:10 in its Reference field at the top of the list, so I can see immediately which commentaries actually comment on Ephesians 2:10.

Now I can simply double-click any of the commentaries listed to open them right to Ephesians 2:10.

Another way to accomplish this is to right- or control-click the reference for Ephesians 2:10 in your Bible text, then choose the group you want from the Search All submenu of the contextual menu.

One of the things that makes Accordance tools unique is that you can show as much or as little of the text as you want. The other day I showed how you could select a couple of articles in the Tool browser and then display only those two articles. That way you can print, copy, and otherwise interact with just the articles you want.

The portions of a tool you see are determined by your search argument and the current setting of the Show pop-up menu. By default, the Show pop-up is set to All Text. That means that when you do a search, the results are displayed in the context of the entire tool. To navigate from hit to hit, you would use the up and down Mark buttons. If, however, you set the Show pop-up to Articles, Accordance will show only the articles which are found by your search.

For example, the Greek lexicon Louw & Nida has multiple articles for words which have a wide range of semantic meanings. In print, you need to use an index to find them all, but in Accordance, you just search for the word and get every hit. If you set the Show pop-up menu to Articles, you can see all the hit articles at a glance, copy them into a document, print them out to take to class, etc.

The other options in the Show pop-up menu let you show even less context. Paragraphs will show only the paragraphs which contain a search hit. That view is so condensed it can actually be hard to know which articles the hit paragraphs are from, so the Add Titles option adds the article titles for each hit paragraph.

Now that you know about the Show pop-up menu, you can do some really cool things. For example, someone recently asked if there was a way to highlight a tool as he reads, then search for all the highlighted text so he can copy just the highlighted phrases without the intervening text. While we can't reduce the context to show just the highlighted phrases, you can use the Paragraph option to show only the paragraphs which contain a highlight. Like this:

You'll still have to copy just the phrases you want, but at least you can see them all together at a glance.

Recently I've been discussing the various cool things you can do with the Tool Browser. The Tool Browser is a powerful and flexible feature of the Accordance application which interacts with the information built into each Accordance module. When we develop an Accordance module, we think long and hard about what should and should not appear in the browser. What will the user expect? Are there special circumstances we need to work around? It's part of what makes developing an Accordance module more of an art than a science.

For example, look at the browser for the NIGTC commentary. Each volume of this commentary has a lengthy title such as "The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text" or "The Epistle to the Galatians: A Commentary on the Greek Text." If we let the entire title show up in the browser, a narrow browser pane would show numerous instances of "The Gospel of" and "The Epistle of" without letting you see the actual name of the biblical book! We therefore tweaked the browser so it would give you the information you need at a glance.

It's that kind of thought that goes into the development of every Accordance module, and many of these decisions are so subtle you would never even notice them. But they are all designed to save you time and effort, to enhance your user experience, and to go beyond merely delivering an electronic copy of a book.

On Tuesday, I showed how you can option-click a section of the Tool Browser to highlight it. When you do, all subsequent searches will be limited to the selected portion of the tool. But this tip isn't just useful when you want to narrow a search; it can also be used to display only the portions of a tool you want to see.

For example, let's say you're studying the Assyrian siege of Lachish described in 2 Kings 18–19, and you want to read a couple of relevant articles from the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible—such as the articles on Lachish and Sennacherib. Unfortunately, you're going to be away from your computer all day. If you had an iPhone or iPad you could just bring Accordance and the ZEB with you, but alas, you don't own an iOS device. You do, however, have a Kindle, and it would be nice to be able to read those articles there.

Using the Browser, you find the article on Lachish and option-click its title to select it. Then you find the article on Sennacherib and shift-option-click its title. Holding the shift key down enables you to select more than one article at a time, so now both articles should be selected in the browser.

Now that you have the articles you want selected, you need a way to show only those articles. To do this, be sure an asterisk is entered in the search entry field, and that the Show pop-up menu is set to Articles. The asterisk tells Accordance to display all the selected articles, while setting the Show pop-up to Articles tells Accordance to show only the selected articles.

Now all you need to do is print to PDF and transfer that PDF to your Kindle!

By using this simple trick, you can specify the precise sections of a tool you want to display, print, copy, or work with.

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.

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.

For the past couple posts I've been showing how to get the most out of the Tool Browser. Here's a simple tip which will soon have you spoiled.

As you know, the disclosure triangles let you expand or collapse a section of the browser. But what if you can't see the disclosure triangle? For example, the top level of the browser for most dictionaries is each letter of the alphabet. Expand one of those sections, and you'll likely get a long list of articles beginning with that letter. As you scroll down through that list, you can very quickly lose sight of the disclosure triangle. Consequently, when you want to close that section of the browser, you first have to scroll up to find its disclosure triangle.

Or do you? In Accordance, you can drag your mouse to the left edge of the browser and the cursor will change to a black X. If you simply click the mouse button at that point, the current section of the browser will be closed, just as if you had scrolled up to click the disclosure triangle!

Back in the days of the classic Mac OS, I used List view in the Finder all the time (in OS X I now use column view). List view uses disclosure triangles just like the Tool browser, and I soon found myself trying to click in the left edge of Finder windows to close a folder whose disclosure triangle was no longer visible. Unfortunately, the shortcut only worked in Accordance, and I would then grudgingly scroll up to locate the disclosure triangle. As I said, when you learn this trick, you'll quickly become spoiled by it. Consider yourself warned!