Building a Logos Bible Software collection

 

Logos is a great bible study tool.  One of its strengths is the access to thousands of books about all aspects of Christianity.

Once you have a set of resources you can use the program to search and research any topic.  The bigger your collection the richer the results because you get relevant material written from different points of view.

Only trouble is, it gives you too much choice, which means trying to figure out how to get started on building a collection is complicated.

Logos offers bundles to help make sense of it.

The bundles can contain a lot of material that you might not ever use. I would think carefully about what kinds of studies you intend to do. 

I expect that the needs of a lay leader, a teaching pastor, a home group leader, or a layperson doing self-study are dramatically different. And even within these roles, your points of interest will vary greatly too. For example, you may be interested in exploring Messianic Christianity or you are interested in Original Language study. I'm just an abnormally bookish layperson. I started with a bundle but found that much of it I never used. 

If I was starting over, I would think carefully about what my role and interests are and go from there. 

For lay people, I would suggest getting a base collection comprising:

• a couple of good bible dictionaries (which in Logos world means encyclopedias, I have Tyndale and Harpers), 
• a study bible (which in Logos world means the notes that comes with a study bible, not the bible text itself e.g. ESV study bible is like that, and you still have to buy the ESV separately) and 
• a couple of general purpose bible commentary sets like Tyndale or BKC. But depending on what tradition you come from none of these may be suitable from your POV. 

Bear with if none of this seems relevant to you. 

After you've got a base collection based on what I suggested above, then you can buy books relevant to topics you want to research. 

For example, I'm reading a lot around the Genderism topic at the moment as its an issue I'm having to deal with in the education sector. 

And for this topic, Faithlife's ebooks store is great. 

After all that, many of the books I wanted to make searchable, weren't in the Logos inventory so I made personal books out of them. 

Feature upgrades (not books) are worth looking at too because they can greatly enhance what you can do within the system.

HTH and YMMV!

How to use Logos Bible Software's Notebook as a Daily Journal or Diary

 Another tip that is too useful not to save here for future reference:

I received this question from a MP Seminars subscriber:

Q.  I want to use the notes tool as a personal journal. Is there a way to anchor the daily note to the date?

A.  I really like this question because it shows he’s thinking outside the box and wanting to leverage the full power of the software.

The answer to his question is an enthusiastic yes and here’s basically how I responded:

1. Open Notes from the Tools menu (A)
2. Open a calendar devotional such as My Utmost for His Highest (B)
3. Notice today’s date in the reference box (C)
4. Click New Note on the Notes Tool (D)

Notice a new note is created anchored to the day of the year (E)

Type whatever text you’d like for the “journal entry” (F)

For even more power:

Create a Notebook for each year like 2020, 2021, etc. (G)

Place 2020 Notes in the 2020 Notebook (H)

Click the 2020 Notebook in the sidebar (I) to see all of the “journal entries” for that year! (J)

How to rename a Notebook in Logos Bible Software 10

 Here it is.  Found on a forum but too useful not to save here for future reference:

1. Select Docs.

2. Double-click to open the Notebook you want to change.

3. Secret door: Click on the gray-out Notebook icon next to the Filter icon (here I have floated the panel to make screen capture easier).

4. Now you will see the elusive three dots next to the Notebook name. It's all downhill from here...

5. Left-click on the three dots and a drop-menu appears. Select Rename.

6. Type in the new name and press Enter. And you're done.

The tab title (under the top-most red circle) may not change instantly, but it will catch up eventually.

Auto highlighting corresponding words in another bible

 

With the Logos Bible Software program, sometimes I'd like to select a word in ESV and then see the corresponding word in the Hebrew/Greek Bible highlighted too. 

This can be done by configuring the visual filters feature.

Corresponding words works within a bible, so you won't see anything unless the word repeats on the visible page. If this is what you want, 

1. Open Logos
2. Open two bibles
3. Lay them side by side, if not already so
4. Click the three dots arranged as a pyramid above each bible and check the Corresponding Words and Lemma boxes.

Corresponding selection works between bibles and ESV works with AFAT, BHW 4.18, BHS/WIVU (almost any Hebrew bible, as well as Greek bibles).  If this is what you want,

1. Open Logos
2. Open two bibles
3. Lay them side by side, if not already so
4. Click the three dots arranged as a pyramid above each bible and check the Corresponding Selection box.

Greek and Hebrew Keyboards in Windows 10

Logos provides ancient language keyboards for Windows PCs.  

They are homophonic (i.e. the Hebrew letters are mapped to the nearest English sounding keys in a standard QWERTY keyboard).

When they work, they make typing Biblical Greek and Hebrew much more easy. 

But after updating to Windows 10 Build 1909, the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard disappears (I don't use the Greek one, so I can't vouch as to whether the same behaviour occurs there). 

The standard Hebrew keyboard uses the mapping from an original Hebrew typewriter. 

After trying various combinations of adding/removing the Hebrew language pack, the other standard Hebrew keyboards and the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard, I got it back on two desktops and my ThinkPad X1 Tablet (Gen 1) but I couldn't get it to come back on a ThinkPad T430.

A workaround:  Use the SBL biblical hebrew and greek keyboards instead.  They can be downloaded from here.

Both the SBL and Logos keyboards support accents, cantillations and vowel points. 

Another better workaround:  I like to use the Logos Biblical Hebrew keyboard, which uses the same maps as the deprecated Shibboleth app mapping.  

You can create your own keyboard using the Microsoft Keyboard creator.  Instructions here.

Stopping the touch keyboard from popping up in Windows 10

While editing MS Word documents on my Lenovo X1 Tablet with the keyboard attached, everytime I touched the screen to change where the cursor was, the Windows touch keyboard would appear and obscure the document.

Painful.

To stop the Windows touch keyboard from appearing, follow these steps:

1. Hit Win-R
2. Open control panel:  Type in "control" and hit "Enter"
3. Tap Administrative Services
4. Tap Services
5. Scroll down to "Touch keyboard and handwriting panel service" and double tap it
6. Set startup type to "Disable"
7. Tap apply and OK.
8. Reboot, and you're done.

Using Logos to make your own Personal Books

Logos is a terrific tool for studying, well, almost any text.  

But it's makers have focused on using it as a study platform for Christian studies.  The software itself is the tool but its utility is unleashed when coupled together with a library of books and multimedia resources.  

Amongst all the bible software developers, Logos has the largest library of resources.  Nearly all the major book publishers have works adapted for the Logos platform.

By tagging content, the content can be efficiently indexed and then searched.

The library of resources that can be purchased is enormous.  Unfortunately, not all resources are accessible for several reasons:

• The publisher or the author may not be inclined to give their consent.
• The publisher or the author may have already given exclusive rights for electronic distribution to someone else
• Logos may ask too much of a margin on the selling price of the resource.
• The publisher or author may be biased toward hard copies.  

Logos allows its users to make their own personal books which can be imported into Logos for personal use.  

It's easy to do.

Just make a Microsoft Word .docx file of the resource and then import it.

All standard format bible references will automatically be turned into hyperlinks to your library's bibles.

There are special tags you can insert into your text if you wish to search content by topic.

One or two hooks to keep in mind:

1. If you want your document to show up in passage guide searches, then build it as a bible commentary, not a monograph or just a commentary.
2. Bible commentaries are specially tagged .docx documents.  Learn the syntax here:  https://wiki.logos.com/Personal_Books.  Once you have inserted the [[xxx]] tag before each verse that has a comment in your document, then if you open your bible in one panel, and your commentary alongside, and if both have been designated in the same set, then they synch with each other as you scroll through either document!  There are many types of documents that can be produced as personal books, such as, encyclopedias, dictionaries, lectionaries, calendar devotionals and more.  I have a lectionary that has all the Jewish annual reading (parasha) calendar.

There are a lot of resources in .epub, .mobi, .html and .pdf format on the web.  This is a cheap way to build out your library, but as always, be mindful of copyright law.  

How to cut down Logos 8's start up time

Faithlife's Logos 8 was released just before Christmas.  

One of the first thing's I noticed after installing it was how long it took to load up.  I don't have a huge collection of books (about 7GB) but it took over a couple of minutes to load.  

Painful.  

Logos 7 was sometimes slow too but I noticed this mostly around searches, I'm glad to report that searching resources seems much slower in 8.  

Here's a fix for greatly speeding up Logos's start up time:

1. Open Program Settings, find At Startup Open to and select Most recent layout - local


2. In the Command Box at the top of the Logos Window (with green GO in Logos 8), type Set Use Ngen to Yes and hit Enter.

My load up time fell to around 20 seconds.  Nice.

How to cope with Logos and its immensity

Over on the Logos Forum, there was a thread about how big Logos was compared to its competing software programs.

Bible study programs used to be just electronic bibles and you could purchase multiple translations and then compare them to gain better insight into how much latitude the original languages gave translators as they parsed the text into English. Then they might present the various translations in parallel to make comparisons more convenient.

Keyword searching made finding the reference of a particular passage really convenience, and looking up references effortless.  Adding original language dictionaries then made the old concordance look ups just so easy.

These days these programs have evolved into publishing platforms with rich interconnections between Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias. Each platform strives with one another to capture the material from the various publishing houses. The more reputable the author, the more useful will be the platform to users.

After nearly 30 years, Logos is the clear leader in this race. In becoming the gold standard, it is also the priciest. Now there are tens of thousands of books that have been published through the logos platform. If a Bible verse or Scripture reference appears in any extra biblical writing, that reference is hyperlinked back to your Bible choice.

Equally users can go the other way, and command the program to provide every reference to a particular Bible reference in every extra biblical resource that the user has purchased. Often tens of thousands of references can be retrieved with one query like that.

Understandably, this means that this is an incredibly powerful tool in which a user could be lost within it for days on end. You can also end up being tempted to purchase hundreds of books that you might never need. Often logos markets the resources in large packages or sets often priced at several hundred dollars each. They argue that the average price per book is much lower but unfortunately in any given set, you might only use less than 10% of it.

For Logos users who are encountering these problems here are a few tips and thoughts that I have gleaned over several years of using Logos:

I only read the home page on the weekend, like reading the weekend newspaper.

Logos is an enthusiastic promoter of the resources that have been published on this platform to users. A lot of it is like spam, there is a constant, relentless drive to promote another resource for users to purchase.

Like any ad, on occasion I do see something of interest and purchase that, but it can be tiresome.

The packages have a lot of stuff that often isn't that relevant to me and sometimes I fret that it's taking up real estate on my hard drive.

In a similar vein the frequent updates used to be annoying because they slowed my PC down until it was unusable until indexing had been completed.

These days, with broadband internet connections, and faster machines, I don't notice it so much.

So I've learnt to use Logos purposefully.  I go into it with a task in mind and stop myself from being distracted by other things.  It's a skill that has to be learnt with the Internet anyway.  Endless hours can be spent surfing with no productive end.

I've found Logos to be really powerful.  For example, I was reading a rabbinical polemic against Christians the other day and the Rabbi said that the writer of Hebrews had misquoted the Torah.

A quick look up of the Biblica Stuttengartsia showed on the face of it, he was right.  How did the error come to be?  I had a look at the Septuagint and the "error" was there.  Whether the mistranslation resulted in a misinterpretation is another story.

I couldn't have done that with my old software, Wordsearch; but I don't know whether it can these days, as I moved to Logos years ago.

It doesn't take long before you can have a mountain of resources which can result in Logos taking a long time to complete a search.  Logos allows resources to be omitted from searches by restricting the search to a particular collection which you need to set up beforehand.

If I only want to search commentaries then I create a collection of commentaries first.  This is a one time task and the collection can be used over and over again.  Depending on the criteria for inclusion, any new commentaries you purchase will automatically be included in the collection.

Never used resources can be discarded from any search so that your computer can avoid wasting effort on them.


I'm sure there are people who buy resources for all the "wrong" reasons but then I'm a great believer in the idea that God motivates people in many strange ways and often we do things for the "wrong" reasons yet they end up being a blessing later (Rom 8:28?).

Anyway, this is my approach to purchasing resources now:

1. Start with a basic collection with the tools you really, really need and then grow your collection from there as the need arises.  For example, my church is doing a study of Ephesians, so I went looking at reviews to find the top three resources on Ephesians and purchased the ones I wanted that are available through Logos. Don't worry so much about the "sales", especially the bundles, you end up buying stuff you never use.  Been there, done that.
2. Look for recommended reading lists from authors and authorities that you trust. 
3. Not all resources are available on Logos' store.  So for the Ephesians study, I purchased them elsewhere and made them into Personal Books. It's worth learning to make Personal Books, because there are lots of resources out there that are very useful, but haven't made it into the Logos product list for one reason or another.  Sometimes publishers won't play ball.  Other times, it doesn't meet Logos' criteria.  Personal books bring the power of Logos to those resources.  I've done a number of these, especially the FFOZ Torah Club.  Lots of work involved in converting that set but so, so useful to see parts of those materials come up in Logos searches.  I know some people will be concerned about copyright but if I'm only using them for myself, and I'm not distributing them to others, then it falls under the "Fair Use" doctrine of copyright law.