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Make Concordances from Files

You can make a Full Concordance or a Fast Concordance from plain text in one or more files.  If your text is currently displayed in another Windows program such as Word or Internet Explorer, you can make a concordance from the Clipboard instead.

On Concordance's File menu, choose either Make Full Concordance or Make Fast Concordance. Then choose From Files.  The Make Concordance From Files dialog opens.  In this dialog you build a list of one or more files that you want to make your concordance from.

Making a List of Files to Read

Press the Add Files button and use the resulting dialog to pick one or more files and add them to the File List. Files can be chosen from anywhere on your computer or its network neighbourhood.  Once they are in the File List, you can re-arrange them by drag and drop. When the concordance is made, the files will be read in the order you have arranged them. You can click on a filename in the File List to see a preview of the first few lines of the file.   

Also see below: 'How many files can I use?'

Making the concordance

When you have the files you want, press the Make Full Concordance or Make Fast Concordance button. 

Including and excluding files from a concordance

At the left of each filename is a tick box.  If you remove the tick, that file will not be included in a concordance. This lets you exclude files without having to remove them from the list.  Files which are ticked are called active files.

Saving the file list

Your file list is saved automatically when you make a concordance and when you close the Make Concordance from Files dialog. You can save it at any time by pressing the Save file list button.  This also lets you save different file lists under different names, which is useful for changing among different projects.

Other buttons

There are also buttons at the top of the dialog to remove a file from the current file list, to clear the file list, and to load any saved file list.

Files which no longer exist will be removed from a file list when the list is loaded.

Filename References

When you make a concordance to more than one file, you can choose to have Concordance automatically add a reference to show which file a word came from. The reference will be the name of the file. To make this happen, tick Add filenames as refs.  Filename references are not automatically added if there is only one active file. 

Filename references are independent of, and additional to, the references you define in the References dialog on the Text menu.

Combining Filename References with normal References

Filename references are additional to the references you define in the References dialog on the Text menu, which remains the main way of controlling references.

If you have already defined reference opening and closing markers in the References dialog, they will be used for filename references; if not, the standard reference opening and closing markers < and > will be used (and they will be set in the References dialog for you).

If you specify a reference letter here, it will be added to the set of references to collect in the References dialog.  If you don't, it will be set to F (which suggests File) and will again be added to the set of references to collect.

Stop List and Pick List

If you are making a Full Concordance, you can edit the Stop List by pressing Edit Stop List, and choose whether to use the Stop List for any concordance by ticking or unticking Use Stop List.

If you are making a Fast Concordance, you can edit the Pick List by pressing Edit Pick List.  

How files are named

If you have more than one file in your File List, Concordance copies them into a new single file before it makes your concordance. The new file is named after the first active file in your list of files to read. For example, if your first file was called Demo1.txt and there were 3 further files to read, they would all be joined into a new file called Demo1.txtPlus3MoreFiles.txt. The corresponding concordance file would be called Demo1.txtPlus3MoreFiles.txt.Concordance.  Both files are placed in the same folder as the first active file in your list of files to read.  You can use Rename on the File menu to change their names later if you like.


'How many files can I use?'

The File List you create is stored in your Concordance.ini file. As from Version 3.0 of Concordance there is no limit to the size of this file, even on Windows 95/98/ME. However, performance may be affected if the list grows too large.