A typical session with XKWIC will consist in a sequence of query input, selecting some or all of the result, saving it as one or several subcorpora, carrying out new searches on further corpora or on the subcorpora, saving relevant results to files, and possibly manipulating the files with UNIX or other tools.
Because you often rerun queries on different corpora and these queries can be quite complex, XKWIC keeps track of your queries. When you click on QUERY HISTORY you can VIEW all your queries. You can select one and rerun it. Or you can select some irrelevant ones and delete them from the list. Under QUERY HISTORY you can also save your queries to a file to be reused in later sessions with XKWIC. Or you can import a file with queries which you've used before.
As we saw before, during a session wth XKWIC you can create subcorpora. If you want to keep these subcorpora for future use, you have to click on SUBCORPORA in the top level menu bar and choose SAVE ALL SUBCORPORA. If you get an error message saying ``Can't save subcorpora. No directory has been defined'' select OPTIONS from the FILE menu, and enter the target directory under LOCALCORPUSDIRECTORY. To enter this information, click DISMISS. (DISMISS here means ``close the window and carry out the options I have just specified'' rather than ``dismiss the options''). Note that these subcorpora are stored as binary files, for future use by XKWIC. If you want to store data for manipulation with other tools, you should save them as files (using WRITE TO FILE in the CONCORDANCE menu).