Open letter to Logos & Verbum users - response appreciated aka informal poll

In using Logos do you rely primarily on layouts that include Guides (Passage Guide, Exegetical Guide, Topic Guide, Bible Word Study, Sermon Starter Guide) or a layout that includes only tools and resources?

If you use Guides, which ones and which sections of them?

If you don't use Guides, why not?

There are a few sections of Guides that are frequently mentioned in the forums which, of course, I assume are used.

Thanks for helping me out.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Lynden O. Williams

Seldom use guides, except maybe an exegetical guide. Leans heavily on customized layouts, which are always changing.

Tim Bray

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615968#Comment_615968

Rely on custom layouts that include custom guides (that include some of my collections) - never use the stock standard guides

Kenneth Neighoff

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615972#Comment_615972

I primarily use a customized passage guide, and right click menu off either the Hebrew or Greek texts for word studies and searches.

mab

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615974#Comment_615974

I usually run the neat Logos combo Passage/Exegetical (enter passage or topic and Go) that I started with back in Logos 4. Needless to say, it runs a whole lot quicker than it used to do. It gives me a better contextual grasp before digging in. I spend more time looking at the several translations I use most first. After that, I usually fire up some more commentaries.

DMB

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615983#Comment_615983

Rarely use guides except for a right-click BWS. Rely on a single tweaked layout from 5 years ago.

Dan Francis

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615997#Comment_615997

I tend to use the passage guide daily as part of my daily devotional study.

-dan

Mark Barnes

I use customised guides heavily. I customise them to remove sections I don't want. So my topic guide has a definitions section, and a collections section for dictionaries not included in the definitions section. My passage guide contains several commentary sections (for different collections) and a sermon section. My BWS contains a lemma section and several translation wheels (for different Bible versions). I don't use the exegetical guide. My sermon starter guide mainly covers themes. I can't imagine using Logos without these guides, and am very intrigued to find some people here don't use them.

Mark Barnes

I can't edit my post as I'm on an iPad. But I should have added that I don't use layouts at all any more. I don't need to because (a) my study tends to be quite dynamic and doesn't fit easily into the strait jacket of a layout; and (b) it's so quick to drag new resources into the most useful locations, it takes no time at all to create exactly the right 'layout' I need at any one moment.

Dave Hooton

In using Logos do you rely primarily on layouts that include Guides

My layouts always include Passage Guide, as well as tools and resources.

If you use Guides, which ones and which sections of them?

Passage Guide: 3x Copmmentaries, Collections, Parallel Passages, Cross References

Sermon Guide (reference based): Theme, Sermons, Collections, Outlines

Topic Guide: Topic, Related Verses, Collections

Bible Word Study: Lemma, Translation, Hebrew Words, Greek Words, Sept. Translation, Text Searches, Root, Grammatical Relationships.

Dave Moser

I use modified guides a lot.

In my experience the most powerful tool in Logos is collections. Dynamic collections are the best way to make sure you are using all of your Logos library. I add them to my guides like crazy. I recently shared how I do this on the Logos blog. It's fantastic for sermon application but I've added a lot more:

Systematic Theology collection on Passage Guide - "Am I missing any major doctrines this text deals with?"
Greek/Hebrew Lexica collections on Exegetical Guide - "Is a word in this passage cited as a special case in a lexicon?"
Greek/Hebrew Grammar collections on Exegetical Guide - "Is this verse cited as an example of a grammatical or syntactical phenomenon?"
etc., etc., etc.

The combination of guides and collections makes Logos indispensable to me.

Glenn Crouch

I guess I am still learning Logos even though I have had it since May 2013 [:)]

So I use the built in Guides quite a bit, together with the Search facilities in the Library. I am moving more to improving MyTags and using Collections - both the ones shared in the FaithLife Groups as well as my own custom ones.

David Medina

I use they Passage and Exegetical Guides a lot.

I love the flexibility of Collections working together with Custom Guides.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616024#Comment_616024

thank you for your answers ... it gives me some information I truly need.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616068#Comment_616068

A bit late but thought I would add some thoughts.

The guide I use primarily is the Passage Guide - customised to split commentaries into different sections and with a few collections added.

I sometimes use the Topic and Sermon Starter Guides to develop some early ideas for things I am starting to look at.

I tend to use a few layouts - as required - for a relatively short period of time. For example, I am currently working on two sermon series and have a layout for each one which has Bibles, a customised PG, commentaries and a search panel. When these series are complete I would expect to delete these layouts and start again.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616072#Comment_616072

Not late, I'll be watching for several days. What I want to get a feel for is how people actually use Logos so can develop training materials for people in my parish that reflects access to what people actually use as opposed to what others assume they ought to use.

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616074#Comment_616074

Not late, I'll be watching for several days. What I want to get a feel for is how people actually use Logos so can develop training materials for people in my parish that reflects access to what people actually use as opposed to what others assume they ought to use.

MJ,

I'm sure you'll keep in mind the different needs of parishoners as opposed to priests/pastors. Just wanted to highlight this again since I think nearly all of those who answered above are pastors or otherwise ordained/licenced/charged to preach in their congregations.

One difference that is obvious for me as an interested layman: I'll use guides (infrequently) to drill down into word meanings, commentaries to a section etc, but I wouldn't run a Sermon Starter Guide - other than for testing or curiosity - and I tend to disregard the sermon-production-related elements in guides (such as Media, Illustrations, Music, links to online sermon archives...) completely. I'm a great fan of Dave Moser's article on how to use Logos to find the application part of sermons, but this is just not the way I use it.

In fact I tend to just have books open, and open more books in more tabs etc. - often using thematic Reading Lists or resources that reference other resources as a starting point (nearly never the Go-Box).

Just my 2c

Mick

Schumitinu

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616024#Comment_616024

I use different layouts for different jobs. This gives me the opportunity to go back and pick up where I left.

I use layouts with and without Guides. I use mostly custom guides. These are the sections I include in guides: Commentaries, Collections, My content, Cross References, Parallel Passages, Literary Typing, Outlines, Visualization, Topic, Themes, Word by Word, Biblical People

John Kight

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/615972#Comment_615972

Rely on custom layouts that include custom guides (that include some of my collections) - never use the stock standard guides

I use similar methodology.

Alan Macgregor

In using Logos do you rely primarily on layouts that include Guides (Passage Guide, Exegetical Guide, Topic Guide, Bible Word Study, Sermon Starter Guide) or a layout that includes only tools and resources?

If you use Guides, which ones and which sections of them?

If you don't use Guides, why not?

There are a few sections of Guides that are frequently mentioned in the forums which, of course, I assume are used.

Thanks for helping me out.

I use customised layouts extensively. I have, at the last count, 23 layouts for various purposes, as the screen shot shows:

Most of these layouts have Guides in them viz. Passage,Sermon Starter. However, I hardly consult them. If I do it is just the commentaries section of the Passage guide to look for additional resources in my library.

I used to have the Exegetical Guide open also but I almost never used it; and it slowed down the program so much as it populated that I deleted it from my layouts, reasoning that if I wanted to use it I would launch it from the Guides menu.

I should probably review my use of the Guides and remove them from my layouts.

I can pretty well do what I want/need to do in Logos just with layouts.

Hope that is of some use.

Every blessing

Alan

Matt Hamrick

I rely heavily on customized passage and exegetical guides and I also rely on the BWS guide at times. I never use the sermon or topic guide as they are worthless for me. I have a reading layout for all my planned reading I use and in that layout I just have the highlighting tool, the plans, the books for the plans, and a dictionary. I also have a language layout so when I am studying the original languages I have the tools available I need. Mark covered it earlier when he said you can make a layout on the fly to suit your needs of the moment. My customized guides change for whatever I am doing. If I am prepping a sermon then I have bible tools available. If I am studying theology or church history I have collections I can search in the guide for whatever I am studying. It's a system I have tweaked since using Logos 4. And I am still tweaking it. I hope this helps.

Donnie Hale

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616119#Comment_616119

When I first started using L4, I relied heavily on the passage and exegetical guides, with some customizations to remove unused sections. I would save layouts, but practically I just worked in one layout and entered references in those guides.

Now I use layouts much more heavily. I have a layout for the series/book I'm preaching at any given moment. I have layouts for the courses I'm taking and papers that I'm researching / writing.

I would like to revisit creating a highly customized combo passage/exegetical guide and seeing if that serves my needs better for some scenarios. But for the weekly "prep for Sunday" routine, my layout has everything I need already open and supports the process I go through.

Interesting thread. Thanks,

Donnie

Allen Browne

In using Logos do you rely primarily on layouts that include Guides ... or a layout that includes only tools and resources?

Only tools and resources. (I might use a passage guide a couple of times a year.)

If you don't use Guides, why not?

I prefer to select the resources I wish to use. If I'm not sure which resource contains what I'm looking for, I'll search a collection.

Tom Smith

I use Passage and Topic guides primarily.

Jonathan Pitts

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616121#Comment_616121

I don't use the guides very often now. I don't know what I want to look up until I get to it. I was waiting for guides to load and not actually reading most of the information loaded.

As an alternative, my layout has the Information and Power Lookup windows open all the time (to about a third of my screen width, not the narrow default size for them). As I read original languages, the Information window gives me the words I don't know. If I need more lexicons, want to look something up in dictionaries or want to compare translations, right-click and Power Lookup seems to be the quickest way to get the Information, prioritised the way I want it.

John Goodman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/616202#Comment_616202

For me the layouts feature is more like a way of saving where I got to on project A while I do some work on project B etc. I don't tend to begin study with a layout or guide but just with searches. When I do use a guide it is normally on my iPad do do a bit of commentary reading.