Have you noticed that Bible reference books are getting more and more graphically rich? It used to be that even “illustrated” Bible dictionaries only featured a relatively small illustration every twenty pages or so. Today, no doubt prompted by our constant exposure to multiple forms of media, it is rare to see a Bible reference book which does not feature lots of illustrations, charts, tables, and sidebars. In Accordance, we now have lots of graphically rich study Bibles, dictionaries, atlases, and photo collections. In fact, Dr. J recently produced an entire podcast explaining how to purchase and use these resources. If you haven’t watched it yet, be sure to check it out.

Now, let’s say you purchase one of these graphically-rich modules in Accordance. Once you’ve installed it, one of the first things you’ll want to do is skim through all the images to see which ones really jump out at you. But in a large resource with lots of text—say for example, the Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible—scrolling through the entire resource just to see all the pictures would be prohibitively time-consuming. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could view only the images and scroll through those?

One obvious way to do this is to click a picture thumbnail to view that image in a large picture window. Then you can click the right and left arrows at the sides of the picture window to view the previous or next image.

PicsTrick

The problem with this approach is that you have to click to cycle through each picture, and because the picture window changes to match the size of each image, you likely will need to keep moving the mouse to click the right or left arrow. The problem of the moving arrows can easily be overcome by pressing the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard, but you still have to press a key each time you want to go to the next image.

Here’s a trick I use to scroll quickly through all the picture thumbnails of an Accordance tool module:

First, I choose the Captions field in the Tool window search bar, and then I enter ?*. That’s a question mark followed by an asterisk, and this combination of search symbols will search for every word in the Captions field.

PicsTrick2

Now that I’ve done my search, I can tell Accordance to show me only those paragraphs which contain a search hit, effectively hiding all the other information in the tool. To do this, I simply choose Paragraphs from the Show Text As submenu of the tool’s Gear menu.

PicsTrick3

Voila! My tool window now shows only the captioned images in the tool, and I can simply scroll to skim all of these thumbnails.

PicsTrick4

I use this trick whenever I’m doing final checks on a tool module prior to its release, but it works just as well for those of you who want to look at all the pictures in your latest Graphics Tool purchase.