Lifeway released version 12 of Wordsearch last month. I had decided after the release of WORDsearch 11 (in 2015) that I had gone as far as I intended to in keeping up with this program, aside from maintaining access to some important resources I have only in CROSS format (most notably the NAC and Lenski Commentary series), but decided today that it was worth it, in the grand scheme of things, to drop another $40 into the investment to keep current with the feature set. I downloaded and installed it early this morning, and these are my initial thoughts.
Like the previous release, the new engine is available only at a cost, marketed at a $50 “regular price”, but available for $40 as a “sale price”. It is being marketed as a “base package”, bundled with 50 books, many (but not all) of which are counted among the 200+ books already available for $0. Perhaps over-optimistically billed as “The premier biblical study tool for preachers and teachers”, this release lists five “New!” features or enhancements:
- Lexicon Explorer
- OneDrive integration
- Sermon Building enhancements
- Cloud Backup enhancement (scheduling)
- “Customizable Toolbar”
After completing the online purchase, I was provided a link to download either a Mac or Windows version, and the Windows link downloaded version 12.0.0.38 (5/23/2018), which installed without incident on my Win10 laptop, on which I was logged on with elevated privileges. The installer subsequently kicked off an upgrade module, which found my WS11 installation, and offered to import its settings for a smooth transition to the new version. However, the imported choked on an open file, because I had version 11 running at the time. Perhaps characteristically, the importer just threw an error message on the screen and appeared to stop processing. It gave no status indication, and did not restart when I eventually closed it.
There was no apparent option to run it again from inside the WS12 application, so I closed it out and found the necessary executable (UpgradeToWS12.exe) in C:\Program Files (x86)\Wordsearch 12. The PC-savvy reader will notice that this installed as a 32-bit application (x86), which is rather surprising at this point, since 64-bit architecture has been thoroughly mainstream for a decade now, and OS support for 32-bit apps is starting to decay (e.g. iOS 11 does not support 32-bit apps). 
With my older version now properly closed out, the UpgradetoWS12 program completed successfully. However, another error was encountered while setting the Text Size in the Settings Helper Wizard – an error I could reproduce at will by attempting to increase the text size setting until I started using a new Desktop.
That the marketing team could only find five things to boast about as “New!” in this release suggests that not much has changed since version 11, and that is a pretty accurate assessment, as far as I have been able to discern during several hours of testing.
The “New!” Customizable Toolbar is virtually identical to the Toolbar in version 11, which was also touted as a “New!” enhancement at its release. Customizations are still limited to enabling/disabling display of the various buttons. They cannot be re-arranged, nor can you define a button for a function not listed among the default buttons. The Notestacks and the Sermons & Illustrations buttons are now side-by-side – instead of being buried behind each other, as they bizarrely were in WS11 – but that seems more like a correction than an improvement. The ordering of the buttons makes a little more sense in this version, but counting this as “New!” in the marketing material seems overstated at best.
The backup enhancements include the ability to schedule regular, automatic backups of User Data (to either your local PC or to Wordsearch cloud storage), as well as the ability to view a list of cloud backups, and to delete unwanted ones. This is a useful addition to the function, but there are other vendors out there that just automatically replicate User Data to their cloud, and make it available across not just devices but platforms – a notorious limitation of Wordsearch that does not appear mitigated in this latest version.
The Sermons & Illustrations tool in version 12 has been tweaked in several ways to make it more useful. Several templates have been created to pre-populate a document with a basic sermon outline following one of eight rather standard formats. It’s debatable how much value that provides your average preacher, but some may find if helpful, and it seems like a nice enough touch. More importantly, several other document “Types” or classifications have been added to the available type index, inviting users to use the tool’s organizing metadata functionality for documents beyond sermons and illustrations (other selectable categories now include Papers, Lessons, and Other). While the change is actually little more than cosmetic, it’s a great idea for encouraging users to get more value out of one the the application’s better features. Entries in the tool’s main window can now also be sorted by Date Used. Most importantly, the Tags from the earlier versions of this tool have been replaced by the Categories mechanism in the Notestacks tool, and the usage is integrated between the two tools (even though they are still called Tags instead of Categories in the Sermons & Illustrations window, for some reason. This makes documents a bit kludgier to tag with categories than they were in this tool before, but the benefits of having a system both more orderly than before and integrated with Notestacks notes will easily outweigh the slight inconvenience.
The new OneDrive integration is a bit of an odd duck. It sounds like a great idea, but is implemented weirdly. The New Features Overview on the Wordsearch Bible website claims that you can publish your documents to OneDrive, but this is clearly not the case. 
Although you can use the tool to move files around within your OneDrive folder, there is no way to save, move, or copy Wordsearch files into or out of OneDrive using the tool featured on the new WS12 toolbar. The closest you can get is to create a 0-byte file using the dialog box’s “New…” button (which would be similar to creating a file on a Unix system by “touch”ing it, something likely pretty foreign to your average Bible Study software user), and then opening the file in Wordsearch’s Word Processor, and editing it by adding your content. HTML files that are already in your OneDrive can be opened, edited, and saved (with the same name, only) from within Wordsearch, but that is the extent of available functionality. Another oddity is that you have to explicitly re-establish the connection to OneDrive every time you restart the application, despite the fact that it recognizes your current logon status and authenticates without asking for credentials. What is perhaps even more mystifying about this new feature is that genuine OneDrive integration for WS documents has been available all along as an option, achieved by defining the local OneDrive folder as the location “My Documents are loaded from:” in the “Startup and Paths” tab in Program Settings – doing this would be an all-or-nothing proposition in terms of where your Wordsearch documents lived, but your OneDrive files (or a subdirectory of OneDrive files) would be fully integrated into Wordsearch (including Search), which the new WS12 solution does not do.
The final new feature is the brand new Lexicon Explorer, which is a pretty useful if limited tool. It is instantiated by double-clicking a Greek or Hebrew word in a text, which triggers the Explorer window to launch, displaying copies of the relevant content of all the assigned lexicons with entries for the word you double-clicked (I really think a right-click option would have been better, but that would be a minor quibble if it weren’t for the general under-use of right-click context menus in Wordsearch). When I first fired it up, the default settings had all my resources with Greek or Hebrew word indexes assigned to the Explorer window. The dialog for tweaking and ordering the list to taste is simple and well-placed. Depending on the word looked up and the resources assigned to the window, the results can be a bit overwhelming for a window which is effectively just an HTML copy of all the combined pages from the various lexical resources. Some lexical resources, such as Barclay Newman’s Lexicon, are not good fits for this tool. The Lexicon Explorer window would be more effective if the entries were separated from each other by collapsible header bars, preferable containing links to the original resources. Nonetheless, this window is a nice addition, and serves well enough as a poor man’s rendition of the word study tools provided by the premier Bible study tool software vendors.
One final and perhaps trivial change I noted: Lifeway seems to have dropped the long-standing (and to me annoying) product name/logo capitalization practice (WORDsearch) in favor of a cleaner looking name using only an initial capital, followed by either lowercase or small-cap letters (Wordsearch). It’s about time. Now if they can just work on dotting their interface i’s and crossing their technical t’s: As I was trying to clarify some intended functionality, I went to the Help menu and selected Wordsearch Help, which unfortunately – but not entirely surprisingly, gave me this:
Update: Two days later, the Wordsearch 12 Help page is still AWOL. How do you let that happen?