Midterm congressional elections are still several months away, but already my mailbox is getting stuffed with political ads, my answering machine is becoming filled with recorded pitches for various candidates, my television screen is getting cloudy from all the mud being slung inside it, and my ears are continually met with various talking points and campaign slogans. If I were to create a campaign slogan for Accordance, I think I would modify the slogan frequently chanted during the last presidential election: “Yes we can!” That’s because any time someone asks us if they can accomplish some task with Accordance, our answer is almost invariably, “Yes you can.”
For example, someone on our forums recently asked if it was possible to search for all the questions in the book of John. He was quickly given the simple solution to use the find-next-character wildcard to search for all the question marks. The answer he got amounted to, “Yes you can, and it’s easy to do.”
Around the same time, the same question was asked on another Bible software forum, and the suggested solutions were all terribly convoluted workarounds. The answer that person received was “No you can’t, but maybe this workaround will get you close.”
Frankly, I see that same pattern repeated time and again. People want to see two or more noncontiguous verses at the same time so they can more easily compare them, or copy them all at once, or print them out. In Accordance, they can simply do a verse search for those references, yet such a seemingly simple task is surprisingly difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish using other programs.
Other users want to search for all the cognate words related to a single root word. In Accordance, you just search by root. With other programs, the power users are stumped to find a workaround that works.
The list of examples goes on and on. Can I print what I see on the screen? Yes you can … with Accordance. Can I copy Hebrew text without the vowel points and cantillation marks? Yes you can … with Accordance. Can I find sites on the map even if they’re not important enough to be included on most pre-drawn maps? Yes you can … with Accordance.
Are there times when we get asked for something Accordance can’t currently do? Sure there are. But the vast majority of the time our answer to the “Can I?” questions is a simple and straightforward, “Yes, you can!”