Make your own corpus and concordancer

By David R. Boxall, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

With Microsoft Word and Excel it's easy to create one's own corpus and concordancer.

CREATING THE CORPUS

1. Use MS Word to put every sentence in your text on its own line. A quick and dirty way to do that is to Find-&-Replace every period in the text with a paragraph marker. (See Edit menu.)
2. Do the same thing with question marks and exclamation points.
3. Convert you text to a table. (See Table menu - Convert text to table) Your objective is a single-column table, with each cell containing one sentence.
4. Copy and paste your table into Excel.
   

SETTING UP THE CONCORDANCER

1. Go to the Data menu in Excel, select Filter, and click on Auto Filter.
2. Notice that a downward pointing arrow appears on the right of the top row of your corpus
   

RUNNING THE CONCORDANCER

1. Click on the downward pointing arrow.
2. Select Custom
3. Select contains from the drop-down menu.
4. Type your search string in the right-hand window.
   

Excel will then display all cells in your corpus which contain the search string.