Live Click is my favorite feature of Accordance, and yesterday I created a few new workspaces to better take advantage of its features. I use Accordance primarily as a reading companion, a place to turn to for reference resources as I read from a print text. Most frequently, I look to Accordance to be a lexicon, a concordance, and a way to see alternate versions/translations. Live Click is the easiest way to do all these jobs.
3-Column Setup
My workspaces are usually two-column based, but this three column setup is ideal if I’m reading from a print text. I don’t need the text zone to be any bigger because I only use it as a way to amplify to the other zones.
One click on ἠστόχησαν and Accordance instantly shows me the entry in BDAG (center zone) and all the occurrences in the NT (right zone). Accordance also looked up the word in all my other lexicons and Koine texts. If I scroll down in the center zone, I find all my other lexicons open to ἀστοχέω. Scrolling down in the right zone shows me the word in all the tagged Greek texts in my library.
That takes care of the concordance and lexicon functions, but what about looking at alternate versions/translations? To do this, all I click once on a verse reference in the text zone. Here, I clicked on 2 Timothy 1:1, and I see a custom group of texts I created called Reading Translations.
Settings
There are a few important Live Click settings to have in place to get the results you see above. You can get to these settings using the gear icon in the top right of the text zone on the left. You can also get there from Accordance preferences (command + comma on a Mac).
This is where you control what text groups you see when you click on a word or a verse. I have a custom group called “Primary Texts +” that has all my Koine texts and all relevant Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin texts, too. The “Reading Translations” custom group has the alternate versions I’m interested in regularly seeing (NA and THGNT for NT) and my favorite translations.
In this same settings section you can control how quickly Accordance responds to your click. You can choose either instant or delayed. I have mine set to instant.
Another important setting pertains to the lexicon pane that appears when you Live Click. You want to make sure you select Show Full Text and Sort by Library (Entry). These settings tell Accordance to show you the full entry in each lexicon and to prioritize searching the headword field.
Finally, for the Word Usage pane (the one that is like a concordance on the right) you want to select the same settings so that you see full verses.
Workspaces
Don’t forget that you can save workspaces in Accordance. Once I got this workspace setup, I then created one for Hebrew and Latin, too.
Now, when I read, I can open one or all of these workspaces with a couple clicks by going to the menu bar and clicking File > Open Workspace.
Live Click is my favorite feature of Accordance, and I hope this post gives you a better idea of how you might take advantage of it.
Brian W. Davidson 