Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

- and, more usefully, frequently given answers!

Use these links to go to different questions and answers:

Getting Started
Using text
Big Files
How many input files can I have?

How do I ...
...show which part of the text a word comes from?
...have numbers in references?
...change the order in which references are displayed?
...suppress quotation marks?
...show compound words?
...exclude words from another text?
...get the sort order I want?
...stop lines being too long?
...make smaller concordance files?
...group parts of speech together?
...save headwords and frequencies only?
...match line numbers in Concordance with Word?
...set the line number with which to begin a concordance?
...limit the number of words of context before and after the headword?
...search for words beginning with capital letters?
...sort capital letters separately from lower case?
...add multiple files in the correct order?
...search for more than six phrases at once?

Using different languages and accented characters
Copying results from Concordance
Using Concordance output with other programs
A Messed-up screen
Can't click on centred contexts
Web Concordances

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Getting Started

Question: What is the easiest way to buy Concordance?

Answer: On-line, with a credit card, at http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/buynow.htm. See How to Buy for more information.

Question: Is it safe to use my credit card on the Internet?

Answer: If you follow the secure link on the online registration page, nobody can intercept your credit card information. It is handled by machine and the process is much safer than letting your credit card out of your sight in a shop or restaurant. But if you are not convinced, you can place your order by phone. Full details are available at the online ordering site.

Question: I do not have a credit card. Can I register Concordance?

Answer: Certainly. Please see How to Buy for more information.

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Using text

Question: Do I have to type in the text I want to use with Concordance?

Answer: No, Concordance can use any plain text file on any disk that Windows knows about - which may include disks on other computers in your network neighbourhood. It can also use text which you have open in any other Windows program that can copy text to the Windows Clipboard. Most can.

If you want to use text from a website on the other side of the world, just display the page in your web browser, select and Copy it, then make a concordance from the Clipboard. Or, if you prefer, you can save the web page to a file on your disk first. If you want to use a word processor file, you can again use the Clipboard, or if you prefer, save the file as plain text (often called ASCII text) first.

Question: How do I make a concordance from a Microsoft Word file?

Answer:   There are two ways to use a MS Word file:

1. With your file displayed in Word, press Control-A, then Control-C. This copies all the text to the Windows Clipboard. Then in Concordance use 'Make Full Concordance... from Clipboard'.

2. In Microsoft Word, save your file as 'Plain text' (in Word 2002; choose the option to insert line breaks) or 'Text Only with Line Breaks' (in older versions of Word). Close Word, then in Concordance choose 'Make Full Concordance ... from Files' and open the text file you saved from Word.

Big Files

Question: How big a file can Concordance handle?

Answer: As big as you like, more or less, provided you have enough free space on your disk. Remember that a full concordance can easily be ten or twenty times as big as the text it is made from. So if you want to handle very big texts, make sure you have lots of free disk space and prepare for a long wait! Or reduce the size of your concordance (see below, 'How do I get Concordance to make smaller files?').

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How many input files can I have?

Question: I am using multiple input files. How many files can I use?

Answer: The File List you create is stored in your Concordance.ini file. From Version 3.0, Concordance should be able to handle really large .ini files, even on Windows 95/98, which normally limits them to 64K. So you should be able to have a very large number of files in your File List.

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How do I ...

...show which part of the text a word comes from?

Question: My text comprises several different documents (or authors, or pages, or sections). How do I distinguish between them in the finished concordance?

Answer: Use references. They are one of the most powerful aspects of the program.

...have numbers in references?

Question: Why are there no numerals in my references?

I've set up references in my text such as 'Page 1 line 5'. But the numerals don't appear in the concordance and all my references just say 'Page line'.

Answer: You must add the numerals 0 to 9 to your alphabet. You can edit the Alphabet yourself, or you can tell Concordance to add characters automatically to your Alphabet as it reads your text. If you do neither of these things, then characters in your source text which are not in your user-defined alphabet will be removed entirely from your concordance, even if they occur inside reference markers.

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...change the order in which references are displayed?

Question: My reference categories are P,B,S and L. I'd like them to appear in that order since I've set them up with commas so that they should read (for example) Measure for Measure, Act II, the Duke, Line 186. In the References dialog I entered the categories in the correct order, but when I made the concordance it displayed them in the wrong order (LPBS). Is there some way to change this?

Answer:    Concordance will use the order in which it first encounters reference categories. Try arranging things so that a P reference is the very first one encountered in your text, followed by a B reference, etc. If necessary, include an empty P reference to get you started. An empty reference looks like this: <P >

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...suppress quotation marks?

Question: How do I stop any word that has a quotation mark in front of it (e.g. 'Ah, 'But, 'Can) showing up at the top of the headword list with the quotation mark attached to it?

Answer: Switch the Wordlist sort from 'Alphabetic Ascending (string)' to 'Alphabetic Ascending (word)'. The words will be sorted as if the quotation marks were not there, so 'Ah will appear next to Ah.

If, on the other hand, you don't want a separate entry for 'Ah (that is, if you don't want the quotation marks to appear at all) you need to remove the quotation marks from your Alphabet -- remember the Alphabet is user-defined -- and also choose not to have them added back into the Alphabet automatically. To do this, open the Alphabet dialog on the Text menu, edit the quotation mark out of the Alphabet, then for 'Characters not in Alphabet, when found in text' choose 'Ignore' instead of 'Add to Alphabet'.

This will mean all quotation marks are stripped from around words.

You may still have a problem if your text has two different entities -- the apostrophe to indicate an elision (possessive), and the single quote to indicate speech -- encoded using the same symbol. Either it is in your Alphabet or it is out: you can't have it both ways. This is a very common cause of difficulty in text analysis and the only cure is to use unambiguous symbols in your text. For example, use double speech marks for quotations, and save apostrophes for possessives and elisions.

...show compound words?

Question: How do I get Concordance to show compound words?

Answer: Include the character which joins the parts of the compound word (usually a hyphen in English) in your user-defined Alphabet, and make sure that character is not included as a Word Separator in the Alphabet dialog. Concordance will recognise the compound words automatically.

If you want to split compound words up into their separate parts, add the hyphen to your Word Separators. This would turn to-morrow into to and morrow.

If you want to join compound words into a single word (for example, turning to-morrow into tomorrow), omit the hyphen from both the Alphabet and the Word Separators, and make sure you have not chosen to add characters automatically to the Alphabet.

If you want to-morrow and tomorrow to be sorted next to each other, as if the hyphen was not there, change the Wordlist sort from 'Alphabetic ascending (string)' to 'Alphabetic ascending (word)'.

If you have words split by hyphens at the ends of lines, the program will not re-assemble them.

See also this topic.

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...exclude words from another text?

Question: How do I make a list of all the unique words in a text file EXCLUDING (against) all the words of another text file? To put it another way, can I compare two texts to see which words are in one text and not in the other?

Answer:   First, make a concordance to your second file (the one containing the words you want to exclude). When the wordlist is displayed, right-click on it and choose 'Copy all words to Clipboard'. Then open the Stop List and choose Paste to paste in all your words. Then make a Fast Concordance to your first file using the Stop List. This concordance will contain all the words which are in the first file except for those which are also in the second file.

You can extend this general approach as you wish. If you use the Pick List instead of the Stop List, you can make a list of all the words in one file which are also in another.

Going one step further, you could make a single concordance to a series of texts except for the last text, then use that list of words as input when making a concordance to the last text. Using the Pick List, this would show those words in the last text which occur in at least one of the earlier texts. Using the Stop List, this would show those words in the last text which have never been used before.

...get the sort order I want?

Question: How do I apply more than one sort order? For example, I'd like to sort contexts by the word before and the word after the headword at the same time.

Answer:   Sorts take effect cumulatively. So you can first sort contexts by the word after the headword, then sort them again by the word before the headword. The result will be that contexts which are equal on the primary (i.e. current) sort criterion (word before headword) will be arranged in order of the secondary (i.e. previous) sort criterion (word after headword).

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...stop lines being too long?

Question: How can I stop files from my word processor having extremely long lines when viewed in Concordance?

I am converting my word processor files by saving them as plain (ASCII) text for use with Concordance. But when I click on a line in Context, and the Text View opens, that line in Text View goes on almost forever, as if the right margin had been extended much too far.

Answer: Most word processors treat each paragraph as a single long line. That way, they can wrap lines whenever necessary to your chosen margins. You need to choose a conversion which respects line-breaks. In Microsoft Word, save your file as 'Text only with line breaks' instead of 'Text only'. (In Word 2002, an option to save a file as text with line breaks does not appear when you choose 'Save as...'' Instead, you can choose to save as Plain Text; an additional dialog will then appear which allows you to select an option to 'insert line breaks'.)

If your word processor really cannot do something like this, you can open the saved ASCII file with a plain text editor, such as the one which comes with Concordance, and add the line breaks (carriage returns) that you want.

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...make smaller concordance files?

Question: How do I get Concordance to make smaller files? I am making a concordance to a big text and the concordance file is huge.

Answer: Here are some suggestions:

Employ a stop list, as cutting out (say) a dozen high-frequency words can halve the final size of the concordance.

Use contexts of selected length and go for very short contexts, such as only one word before and after the headword. You can even choose zero words before and after.

If your file is still too big, make a Fast Concordance instead of a Full one.

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...group parts of speech together?

Question: How can I find a way to group together all instances of prepositions, determiners, and pronouns in a text in order to see how significant the grammatical texture is as a subset of the total lexis?

Answer: Prepare a lemma file with every preposition you can think of as a child of the same parent. In the same lemma file, make another entry for conjunctions - again enter all the conjunctions, and make them all the child of one parent. Do the same for any other categories of interest.

As for the choice of parent, you could use a very common preposition, conjunction, etc, but of course if it happens not to occur in a text, no lemmatisation will get done. So it is better to choose a dummy entry as the parent: a word which will never occur naturally in your files. For example:

Conjunclist
-- and
-- but

ArticleList
-- a
-- the

and so on.

Add each of the dummy parent words (conjunclist, articlelist, etc) to each file you are going to analyse. Then make your concordance and lemmatise it. This brings all the words of each category together.

Now the clever bit. Adding those dummy words to each of your texts makes the statistics (e.g. word percentages) slightly wrong. So with the concordance displayed and lemmatised, carefully delete each dummy word from the headword list, then choose 'Recalculate statistics' on the View menu.

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...save headwords and frequencies only?

Question: How can I export just the headwords and their corresponding frequencies to a file, without the concordance contexts?

Answer:   Just turn off the display of contexts before you export. To do this, click 'None' at the bottom-right corner of the context display, or go to the Contexts menu and choose 'None'.

Concordance works on the general principle that if you turn off the display of some element, it is not included when you export.

Another way is to right-click on the Headwords display, then choose 'Copy all words to Clipboard' from the pop-up menu. Then you can paste the headwords and frrequencies into any other Windows program.

For more information, see this help topic: 'Selecting elements to include'.

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...match line numbers in Concordance with Word?

Question: I don't seem to be able to get my line numbers in Concordance to match the line numbers in MS Word. Can it be done?

Answer:   Yes. After you have used Word to add automatic line numbers (File | Page Setup | Layout | Line Numbers), get Word to save a copy of the file as 'MS-DOS text with line breaks' instead of a Word document. Then close the file in Word and make a concordance to that file. Concordance shows the correct line numbers as in Word.

For this purpose, don't use Concordance's ability to grab text by copying from Word via the clipboard. This way, the line numbers will seldom match, since the places where Word wraps
the lines within a paragraph depend on so many variable factors - your chosen margins at that point in the Word document, the style and size of font, etc. None of that information has meaning outside of Word and doesn't get transmitted via the clipboard. Hence Concordance won't know exactly where Word wrapped
each line. (Hmmm...)

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...start my concordance at a line number ?

Question: Can I concord together two separate sections of a text while omitting the rest, and still reference all words with their correct line numbers? I have marked up my text with line number references, like this: <L xxxx>.

Answer:   Yes. Add a new reference, with any old content, at the start of the section you want to include. E.g. <S section> Then set the S reference empty at the end of what you want, e.g. <S >. This can be repeated as often as you like, with <S section> coming again later in the text. Then make a Fast Concordance selecting text by reference, picking all text where reference category S has the value 'section'. You can of course also have the L references, for line numbers, collected and displayed.

Another approach is to make a Fast Concordance using sampling of consecutive words. This, however, requires you to specify the word numbers, rather than the line numbers, with which to stop and start selecting. You can use Concordance itself to establish the word number of your starting point, to save you counting manually: this is done by showing duplicate words separately (see the Headwords menu) and sorting in order of occurrence.

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...limit the number of words of context before and after the headword?

Question: How can I set or limit the number of words before and after the search word?

Answer:    Choose Context Styles on the Text menu, then switch Context Type from 'actual line' to 'selected length' and choose a length.

...search for words beginning with capital letters?

Question: Is it possible to search for certain words beginning with CAPITAL letters only?

Answer:   Yes. You need a Regular Expression Search.

To enter a regular expression, go to the Text menu and choose Configure Regular Expression search, or open the Make Fast Concordance dialog and press the Edit button next to Regex.

A Regular Expression which will find words beginning with capital letters is

    [A-Z][a-z]+

-- assuming your desired alphabet is the Roman A to Z, of course.

You can read more about this in the Help topic on Regular Expressions.

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...sort capital letters separately from lower case?

Question: Can one distinguish capitals and lower case in the sort?

Answer: Yes: on the Text menu, choose Special, then 'Treat upper and lower case separately.' When the concordance is displayed, apply the sort you want.

...add multiple files in the correct order?

Question: Is there a way to input files for concordancing in the sequence that one finds -- e.g., chapter 1 before chapter 2 before chapter 3, etc., instead of in the reverse order?

Answer: If you select multiple files (control-click) in the Choose Input Files dialog which opens when you press Add Files (and which is standard Windows) it does, annoyingly, add them backwards. Complaints to Mr. Gates, I believe. You can overcome this by adding the last one first and working up the list instead of down it. The approved Windows method, however, is to press the Details button in the Choose Input Files dialog, then click on the Name column header while holding the shift key. This sorts files in reverse name order. Then when you select multiple files with control-click, they end up in the right order again.

If your files do end up in the wrong order in Concordance's Make Concordance from Files list, they can be re-arranged by dragging and dropping, though obviously that's a nuisance if you have a lot of files.

Once you have the files in the order you want, Concordance will use that order to concatenate and concord them.

...search for more than six phrases at once?

Question: How can I search for more than 6 phrases at once? Concordance limits the phrase search to 6 items at a time.

Answer: A work-around is to use a text editor to alter your text, doing a search and replace to turn all occurrences of each phrase into a long compound "word". So for example the phrase "evidentiary due process" would become "evidentiary_due_process". Then put your "words" into the Pick List and make a Fast Concordance using the Pick List. (This works because the Pick List can handle any number of words at once, but each must be a single word.)

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Using different languages and accented characters

Question: My non-English characters are not showing up in my concordance.

Answer: On the Text menu, choose Alphabet. Add the characters you want to your user-defined Alphabet, or tick the box to have Concordance add them automatically when making the concordance.

Question: I went into Text, Alphabet and added the accented characters I need, but they are still not recognised.

Answer: Your texts may have been prepared in ASCII (the old DOS character set) instead of ANSI (the Windows character set). In the Alphabet dialog, try ticking the box 'Translate OEM characters to ANSI'.

If you look carefully at the Progress dialog which appears while the concordance is being made, you can see just which characters are being found in your source text but have not been added to your Alphabet.

Question: Why can't I sort words with accented characters?

My text has words with accented characters. I have declared them in the alphabet and they appear correctly in the Wordlist. But a word like À appears at the end of the Wordlist after ?. How do I make it appear next to ? instead?

Answer: Change the Wordlist sort from 'Alphabetic ascending (string)' to 'Alphabetic ascending (word)'.

Question: Why does the Stop List remove some characters from words when it reads in a file I created? For example, 'NËT' is in my file but it becomes 'N' and 'T' on separate lines.

Answer: The Stop List and the Pick List can use either a default English Alphabet or your user-defined Alphabet. On the Options menu of the Stop List or Pick List Manager, choose 'User-defined Alphabet' and then press 'Edit Alphabet' to add the characters you want.

Question: I am using a non-Western language. Everything displays fine in Concordance, but when I make a Web Concordance or HTML file, the wrong characters appear (I get garbled special European characters). Why?

Answer: Go to Tools > Preferences > Miscellaneous and un-check 'Convert to HTML entities during output'. There is also a page here in the help system that may be useful.

Question: I have tried pressing 'Switch Keyboard' in the Language and Font Control. Why doesn't my computer respond?

Answer: If you have an older version of Windows, you perhaps haven't yet installed the Windows support for any extra languages other than your usual language. In Windows 98, go to Windows Control Panel, choose Keyboard, then look at the Language tab. (In Windows NT, go to Windows Control Panel, choose Regional Settings, then look at Input Locales). It will list the installed languages. If a language you want is not installed, you can press the Add button to install it. However, this is a mere convenience, not a necessity. For example, if you install French as an additional language to English, it will allow you to turn your keyboard into a French layout (AZERTY instead of QWERTY, etc.). But Concordance will still handle French texts without that.

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Copying results from Concordance

Question: I want to copy a few result screens with a headword, contexts, and references, not the whole concordance. Is there a way to do this?

Answer: Just make a Fast Concordance, picking only the words you want. Then you can print the results, or save them as text or as HTML.

Before doing this, you might wish to rename your full concordance or move it to another folder, to prevent it being over-written when you make a Fast Concordance to the same text.

Question: Is there a way to copy the headword list on the left of the screen?

Answer: Three alternative ways:

Right-click on the Wordlist and, from the pop-up menu, choose 'Copy all words to Clipboard'. Then paste them into any other program of your choice.

On the Edit menu, turn on Multi-select. Select all the words you want, and then choose 'Copy to Clipboard'.