Good morning all,
My favorite tool in Wordsearch was Instant Verse Study.
For those not familiar with it, you had a checklist of Bibles and Commentaries, and you selected a handful of each and the full text of the Bible Translation and Commentary articles were instantly available to just read and delete or export/print to Word, etc.
I have been working on trying to create a workaround in Logos. The Bible verse/translation part was easy. There are two ways to do it quickly in Logos. The Commentary part, not so much. There is not an exact match in Logos.
Many people familiar with Logos mention the Passage Guide, but that is way more than you got with Instant Verse Study. I utilize the passage guide extensively in my Bible Study, but Instant Verse Study went something like this.... I was listening to a virtual seminar one day and a verse was quoted that instantly spoke to me and which I did not remember ever reading before. I grabbed my phone, pulled up the Wordsearch App, checked off 5 Translations and 5 commentaries, and in less than 10 seconds had much more knowledge of that verse without it taking any time.
So, you have to do this in Logos in several stages:
1. Create two collections, one of Bible translations that you would use for this exercise and one of Commentaries. If you choose option 1 below, you do not need the Bible Translation Collection, just commentaries.
2. For the Bible Part:
Option 1: Open your preferred translation, navigate to the verse, and hit F7 for Windows. Compare Translations feature puts up a strip that shows Bibles prioritized in your library for that verse.
Option 2: Starting with an empty desktop, Create a new passage list from the Docs menu. Where it says +Add Versions, select the Bible Translation Collection you created in 1. above. Then put in your passage and make sure you have it set to full and not compact. The verse will instantly appear, full text, in all the translations in your collection and can be printed and exported just like Instant Verse Study.
3. For the Commentary Part:
You have a desktop already with your preferred Bible or a Passage list, depending on whether you chose option 1 or 2 above.. Go to the Guides menu and create a new Guide. Base it on a Bible Reference. From the list on the right, choose Commentaries and in the drop down, choose the collection you created and the number of commentaries you want shown. Ideally the same number as in the collection. Then close it, Go to the Guides menu - Custom Guides and select your new Guide from the list. It will open next to your preferred Bible or the Passage List whichever you chose for the Bible Part.
Now, if you are using the Bible and Compare Translations feature, you can set both the Bible and Custom Guide to Linkset A and the guide will follow in the Bible. Unfortunately, you can only see a few lines of each article in the guide. You would have to open each resource by clicking on the hyperlink and then copy / past whatever text you needed.
If you are using the passage list, you will need to input the passage in both the list and the guide as the list does not have a link option.
Once you have set all this up in a layout that you like you can save the layout as InstantVerse Study or however you want to name it and then when you need a quick look at a verse, just go to that layout.
If anyone is interested, I will create a step-by-step guide on how to do this in Word and can try to post it here. It will take me a few days, and I won't start working on it if no one is interested.
It won't mimic the Wordsearch functionality exactly, but it is as close as I could get to it in Logos.
I still highly recommend Logos come up with the functionality. It exists on the Bible Translation side, it just needs a commentary functionality similar to the passage list.
The user would have to set up their own collections for it, but I see that as a plus anyway.
And if it is in two separate lists, they would need to link somehow so the passages do not need to be entered twice.
Since it is halfway there, It doesn't seem that complicated to get it the rest of the way, but I am not a programmer, so I do not really know that.
If several people are interested, I will create the guide and include my email address so that you guys can send me an email so I know where to send it.
Thanks, Carla
