Category: Examples

Quick tip: Switch to Concordance View in search results

SwordSearcher 8 has two view modes for Bible search results. The default mode, called full view, shows complete verses with search results highlighted. This is usually exactly what you want, but there is another way of viewing search results that you may want to use on occasion, called Concordance View.

Concordance View screen shot
Verse List showing Bible search results in Concordance View mode.

To switch to Concordance View, just click the Concordance View toggle button in the toolbar.

The layout of Concordance View is similar to a printed Bible concordance, with each match from the search shown on a single line.

Although the normal Full View mode shows more, Concordance View has some advantages:

  • It is easier to locate a single verse out of a large set of results, if you think you will recognize it just by its placement in the verse.
  • All matches are shown in a single page.
  • Each match in a verse is shown on its own line (see the asterisk lines in the above picture).
  • Complex search results with overlapping matches can be easier to understand in Concordance View.

Holding the mouse pointer over a line will present a pop-up preview of the entire verse. Clicking the line will open the verse in the Bible panel. Concordance View has mostly the same options on the right-click pop-up menu as Full View mode.

Verse Widgets are visible in Concordance View. If you would like to turn them off to have more space for the search results, you can do so in File, Preferences under Verse List Defaults.

New video quick-tip: Custom Search Ranges

Normally, a whole-Bible search will find what you are looking for in a snap.

But sometimes, you’ll want to narrow things down a bit.

This video shows how you can use the Search Bible window to specify any arbitrary portion of Scripture as your search range, so you can limit the search results to any section or sections of the Bible you choose.

Watch the video here.

Navigation tip: Back History in Panels

A customer asks via email: “How can I go back to a verse I was viewing in the Bible panel before I clicked another one?”

Each of the SwordSearcher reading panels (Bible, Book, and Commentary) has a pair of navigation buttons for navigating back and forward through your view history. Separating the navigation history by panel type means that you can navigate independently in each type of library resource.

Also, as shown in the image below, if you right-click a back or forward button, a history of your locations will appear, from which you can select. This example shows my back history list in the Bible panel:

Image of Bible panel back menu
Back menu in Bible panel

The navigation back menu is updated each time you explicitly set the location for a panel, such as by clicking a Bible verse link or typing the reference into the main search bar. The forward history is updated each time you use the back menu, in case you want to return to what you were viewing before using the back menu.

Using the Find Related Verses tool (video)

Cross-referencing is the most powerful and reliable method of understanding verses, because it allows the Bible to speak for itself.

SwordSearcher contains many tools to enable comparison of Scripture with Scripture.

One of these is the Find Related Verses tool. This video demonstrates how you can use this feature to develop your own cross-references on any passage.

Watch the video here.

Video quick-tip: How to search for punctuation in the Bible

SwordSearcher supports powerful search “tokens” including Boolean operators like the exclamation point (to find a verse that does NOT have the word), and the wildcard character question mark.

So then, how do you search for actual punctuation characters using SwordSearcher, since those characters have a special meaning to the search engine?  It’s easy. This video demonstrates how to use the “character string search” function to search for punctuation or any other exact sequence of characters in the Bible.

New video quick-tip: Expand to Chapter in Commentary Panel.

Sometimes you will want to be able to “read through” a chapter of commentary text continuously. This video demonstrates using the “Expand to Chapter” feature of the Commentary Panel in SwordSearcher, which loads all of the commentary entries from a chapter at one time. Watch the video here.

This is an enhancement in the new version 7.2 release.

Analyzing verses from a Bible search

Here’s a somewhat obscure but interesting and often useful feature of SwordSearcher.

The Passage Analysis feature (added in version 7.1) gives you lots of details about sections of the Bible, such as a book or group of books. (See this detailed video for details.) Information includes a full list of words ranked by frequency of “uniqueness” to the passage, word count, versification metrics (number of chapters, most verses in a chapter, most words in a verse, etc), and more. The Passage Analysis tool is normally opened from the Search menu.

However, what’s not obvious is that the Passage Analysis tool can also be invoked based on a verse list. This option means that you can analyze verses from a search result. (In fact, you can do this with any verse list, including ones loaded from the Scan Text for Verse References tool or from Book and Commentary Panels.)

For example, do a search for the word scripture, and you will get a verse list result like this:

Search results for a Bible search
Search results for a Bible search

To “analyze” just the verses from this search, right-click in the verse list panel and select “Analyze All Verses” from the “Passage Analysis” menu item:

Right-click menu for verse list, Passage Analysis, Analyze all Verses.
Right-click menu for verse list, Passage Analysis, Analyze all Verses.

This will open the Passage Analysis tool and analyze all of the verses from the search results. This is what it looks like:

Passage Analysis of all verses in the Bible with the word "Scripture"
Passage Analysis of all verses in the Bible with the word “Scripture”

This can be quite interesting. For example, take a look at the “Most Unique” ranked word list. Scripture is the first word in the list, because that’s the word we searched for, so every verse in the Bible appears here. But right below that we can see that the words foreknew, foreseeing, noted, and private only appear in verses that also have the word Scripture. Now this may or may not carry some significance, but the only way to find out is to start studying.

Again, be sure to watch the video demonstrating the use of the Passage Analysis tool to see if this could be useful with any of your own Bible search results!

Different Bible text display modes

In its default configuration, the SwordSearcher Bible panel shows text in a columnar format along with a “study margin” for fast access to verse-based material within the chapter.

Start video
Watch the video (1:52)

Sometimes you will want to quiet things down a bit. For example, during devotional reading it can be advantageous to switch off the margin area to devote more visual space to the Bible text, or change to paragraph format for a different reading flow.

There are two helpful toolbar icons in the Bible panel that can be used to change the display format with one click. There is a button for margin toggle and one for paragraph mode toggle, as you can see in this screen shot:

Continue reading “Different Bible text display modes”

Copying Bible Verses into Word Documents (updated video with new content)

Version 7.1 includes improvements to the configuration options for formatting verse text when copying verses to the Windows clipboard for pasting into other applications. A prior video showed some quick tips on using the copy features in SwordSearcher.  I’ve updated this video to reflect the improved options in 7.1 and also cover more copy & paste scenarios.

Watch the video here.

  • Copying selected verse text into a word processor or email.
  • Using the copy verse widget.
  • Changing the verse tags and other formatting options of the copied verses.
  • Verse auto-paste.
  • Copying verse text from links in books and commentaries.