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Getting Started: analyse your first text

Remember that context-sensitive help is available at nearly all times by pressing the F1 key.


Quick Start

Here's a minimalist's guide to using Concordance:
  • Select 'Make Full Concordance'  from the File Menu, then select a plain (ASCII) text file containing the text you want to use. A Full Concordance show all the words from your text. If you want to analyse another kind of file that is not plain text (for example, a file from Microsoft Office, or from a web page), see Preparing Text .
  • I urge you to begin with the tutorial files which are in the Sample Files folder where Concordance is installed.  The first one is called Demo1.txt.
  • Alternatively, choose  'Make Selective Concordance' from the File Menu. A Selective Concordance shows only the words you select. Specify the words you want to include in your concordance, then select the file containing your text.
  • The concordance will be made and displayed.  The left-hand pane is the Wordlist View, containing the words found in the text, with these number of times they occurred.  Click on any word to display all its contexts in the right-hand pane, the Context View.
  • In the Context View, click on a line and a viewer will open showing the full text from which the concordance was made, positioned to the line you clicked on.
  • In the full text viewer, double-click on any word, and the Wordlist View will position itself to display that word.  

    After that, see Preparing Text and Changing What's Displayed to get fuller control over your results.

    Concordance has a huge variety of flexible options. Before you start on a large or important project, it is always a good idea to develop and test your settings by using very small files and checking that the results are what you would expect. Concoct such files for the purpose if necessary.

    Don't overlook the tutorial files in the Sample Files folder where Concordance is installed.  You are strongly recommended to make concordances to them as a quick way of learning the essential features of the program.

    More advanced tutorial material, written by professional users of Concordance, is available on the web. Links are on the page on the Concordance website entitled Getting started with text analysis.

    See also:
    What is a concordance?
    What the program does
    The program's main window
    Tutorial files

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