Instructions to create PB from OliveTree notes

Andreas Mueller
Andreas Mueller Member Posts: 4
edited November 20 in English Forum

I'm still fairly new to Logos. I'm a layperson who just loves to study God's word with the most advanced software I can afford. After using OliveTree for many years I started wondering if there might be an even more enjoyable bible software out there. That's why I started using Logos and I love it very much!

The biggest difficulty in moving from OliveTree to Logos was for me that I had already a huge number of notes in OliveTree. I did find multiple older posts in this forum where people were looking for help with moving their notes to Logos but I didn't find any instructions how to do it without copying each note by hand. That's why I created the instructions below to create a PB from all OliveTree notes. I share them here in the hope that they will help others who are interested in moving from OliveTree to Logos.

I'm sure these instructions are far from perfect. All of my notes were related to one specific bible verse each. It might be easier if someone created a tool to do all this automatically but then it wouldn't be so easy to modify everything according to your taste. Please let me know if you have suggestions how to improve these instructions!

Here are the steps that I used:

  1. Login to your account on olivetree.com
  2. click on the last button "Olive Tree Study Sync"
  3. this brings you to sync.olivetree.com. Log in with your account
  4. click on share
  5. click on the export button next to "XML export"
  6. now you can select which tags you want to export. I personally just clicked on "Export All"
  7. your browser should now download a file called otannotations.xml
  8. open this file with Excel
  9. Excel will ask you how you want to open this file. Select "as an XML table" and confirm with OK
  10. confirm with OK that Excel should create an XML schema
  11. at this point Excel tells me that it encountered errors and that my data has been truncated. So far I haven't found any issues with my notes. To me it seems to be safe to just confirm with OK.
  12. click on the little triangle in the header of the column "BookBegin" and deselect the checkboxes in front of "(Blanks)" and "0". In the same way remove in the column "Icon" the checkboxes in front of "113" and "(Blanks)". Now only notes related to a specific bible passage should be shown.
  13. select all the cells in the columns "BookBegin", "ChapterBegin" and "VerseBegin" and click on the little yellow icon outside of the top left corner of the selection and click "convert to number"
  14. the notes are sorted by default in the order in which they were created. For our PB it is much nicer to have them sorted by biblical book, chapter and verse. Click for this on the little triangle in the header of the column "VerseBegin" and select "Sort smallest to largest"
  15. do the same for the column "ChapterBegin"
  16. do the same for the column "BookBegin". The notes are now sorted by their bible passage.
  17. the column "Title" contains by default the bible passage as string. However, the abbreviation of the biblical book in the title depends on the language of the device which was used to create the note. This won't always work in Logos. Instead we need to create a second sheet with one column and all biblical book names in the different rows. I suggest to give this sheet the name "Books".
  18. back in the first sheet we can now add a new column in which we create for each note the text that we want to have in our PB. The header of this column doesn't matter. I call it "entries". To fill this column with the entries for our PB enter in the first cell beneath the header the following formula:
  • optionally: if you want to display the date when the note was created in OliveTree and the date when the note was last modified you can add to your column "entries" something like "(created: "&TEXT(([@CreatedDate]/86400)+DATE(1970,1,1),"mm/dd/yyyy")&", modified: "&TEXT(([@ModifiedDate]/86400)+DATE(1970,1,1),"mm/dd/yyyy")&")"
  • instead of one column "entries" you can create multiple columns with different fonts (e.g. first line of the entry in bold font, last line with the dates in smaller font). We can easily merge the different columns later in Word
  • now select the columns which you created yourself with the text which you want to have in the PB and copy them
  • open an empty document in Word and paste them
  • select the entire pasted table and choose from the Layout tab "Convert to text"
  • select "paragraph marks" to separate the different columns and confirm with OK
  • save file as docx and import it as usual in Logos

    • Optionally: if you want to have a link in your notes in the PB which opens the corresponding verse in OliveTree you can add in Excel a column with the formula "=HYPERLINK("https://www.olivetree.com/bible/"&[@BookBegin]&"."&[@ChapterBegin]&"."&[@VerseBegin],"Go to verse in OliveTree")" and then use for example the Chrome extension requestly to replace "https://www.olivetree.com/bible/" (this url actually doesn't exist) with "olivetree://bible/". When clicking on the link in Logos you still need to confirm this action in your browser but I think it is better to keep that for security reasons.

    Hope these instructions don't violate against any forum rules. I just want to help others to use Logos in the best possible way!

    Tagged:

    Categories