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Tool Browser Tricks


Helen Brown

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In Accordance Tools modules, you can open a browser pane which will give you a hierarchical listing of that tool's articles and subarticles. In versions prior to 6.0, the presence of this browser was easily missed, since it was marked by nothing but a disclosure triangle in the top left corner of the Tool window's display pane. In version 6.0, this disclosure triangle is labeled "Browser," and so should be easier to find.

 

Here are a few tricks for getting the most out of the Tool window's browser pane:

  1. Using the browser to navigate to an article. The main purpose of the browser is to enable you to "browse" the contents of a tool to find the articles that interest you. When you find the article you're looking for, simply click on its title in the browser to view it in the tool display pane.
  2. Seeing the forest for the trees. When you search a tool, some "hits" may appear in the middle of a long article, and you'll find yourself wanting to know which article you're looking at.
    One way to discover this is to look down at the Go To field in the bottom right corner of the window. This will usually tell you the name of the main article, and then the specific subarticle you're looking at, but it will not show you the hierarchy in between. For example, deeply nested in Anchor Bible Dictionary's article about "David" is a subarticle entitled "3. David and Bathsheba." When looking at this article, the Go To field reads "DAVID (PERSON): 3. David and Bathsheba." Thus, I know the main article, and the current subarticle, but I don't know which subarticles come between the two.
    An easy way to see where the current subarticle fits into the structure of the main article is to open the Tools browser. In the case of Anchor, the top level shows an alphabetical listing, and since I'm looking at the article on "David", the letter "D" is highlighted. To quickly go right to the current article in the browser, I can hold down the option key while clicking on the disclosure triangle beside the letter "D". Doing so will automatically open every level of the browser down to the current subarticle.
    In this case, the browser shows me that I'm in the article "DAVID (PERSON)," the subarticle "E. Decline," and the sub-sub-article "3. David and Bathsheba."
  3. Narrowing your search. You can option-click any title in the browser pane (the title, not the arrow) to select just that portion of the tool. Having done so, all subsequent searches of that tool will be limited to the portion you've selected. This comes in especially handy when using tools like the Early Church Fathers modules.
    For example, let's say I want to search Augustine's Anti-Pelagian writings for every occurrence of the word "substance" in the body of an article. To do this, I would open the Church Fathers-Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Part 1 (CF-NPN1). I would then open the browser pane to see the title of each volume in this fourteen volume series. Next I option-click on the title for Volume V, containing Augustine's "Anti-Pelagian Writings." Now, I simply search the English Content field for the word "substance" and get 90 occurrences. If I had searched the entire CF-NPN1 module I would have gotten 1269 occurrences!
  4. Searching non-contiguous sections. We've just seen how you can option-click a section of a Tool's browser to limit your searches to just that section. You can also use the shift key to select multiple, and even non-contiguous sections of a tool for searching. This gives you a tremendous amount of flexibility in searching your tools modules.

David Lang

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks again this very helpful!

 

Chris

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  • 4 years later...

I am still at a loss. I have AF and CF. If I look for example for Gregory of Nyssa, I have to be sure I am in the right module (before,during, or after NIcea), then I have to play with English, Greek, article buttons, then I might get a reference or two in a footnote to something in someone else's writing. How do I find the author in Texts or General Tools?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Dennis,

 

I'm not sure how I missed seeing this post until now, but your question prompted me to begin a new series of posts to the Accordance blog on getting the most out of the Church Fathers. Be sure to check out this first post and keep an eye out for follow-up posts later in the week.

 

Hope this helps.

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Dennis,

 

I'm not sure how I missed seeing this post until now, but your question prompted me to begin a new series of posts to the Accordance blog on getting the most out of the Church Fathers. Be sure to check out this first post and keep an eye out for follow-up posts later in the week.

 

Hope this helps.

Thank you, David, for the lesson in your blog; it was helpful. Before you posted this, I thought a solution would be to compose a Table of Contents. This I did by taking each module of CF in turn and scrolling by Volume. Each Volume heading shows the Fathers contained. Using OmniOutliner I copied and pasted those headings. Those Tables of Contents are kept in User Tools. Not at all elegant, but it works.

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