NEW: Bible Study and Sermon Visual Filters are ready for beta testing on Desktop

To access this functionality, a license is required. If you’d like to participate in testing the recent improvements to Visual Filters, please join this Faithlife group.

Just as you see indicators in your Bible for notes you have created in Logos, so now you’ll be able to see similar indicators for the sermons and Bible studies that you have written, using the new Bible study and sermon visual filters shipping in v45.

This feature helps remind you of Bible studies and sermons you’ve prepared in the past and gives you easy access to them during your Bible reading.

We know that most sermons and Bible studies aren’t just on a single verse but on a passage, and it’s important to know not just when the sermon or study begins, but when it ends. Each of these new visual filters has not only an icon indicator but also a left margin ribbon to help you easily identify the range covered by your sermon (highlighted here in yellow) and Bible studies (highlighted here in orange).

When you have an icon or margin ribbon displayed, hover over it to receive a tooltip with information on the documents available.

To receive more details, click on the tooltip to open an interactive popup that provides a preview of the content and immediate access to open the document for additional reading.

If you’re a pastor, the sermon and Bible study visual filters are an easy way to revisit where you’ve preached.

We’re excited to ship this feature to Desktop in v45, with Web and Mobile to follow closely thereafter. Our team is still adding final polish in the beta cycle, and we value your feedback in the comments!

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Desktop App

Comments

Graham Criddle

Hi @Anna Adent

Firstly - I really like this feature, something I have wished for for a long time. Thank you!

I will experiment further but one initial question. As the screenshot below shows I have two sermon documents on the first few verses of Revelation 21 - one that goes up to verse 5 and one to verse 6.

Any chance of having multiple margin lines to show the "extent / range" of each sermon?

MJ. Smith

This is a much needed enhancement. Thank you. (Note I do appreciate the movement from guides to Factbook as a major step in decreasing maintenance costs, but so far it affects content I rarely use.)

Anna Adent

Glad to hear that, @Graham Criddle!

Any chance of having multiple margin lines to show the "extent / range" of each sermon?

Thanks for asking about this. We considered a couple different approaches and ultimately felt that a single margin line/ribbon indicating the span of verses that have one or more sermons is the best way to bring attention to your existing documents without cluttering your view, something we keep front of mind. This is especially important when reading passages that have more than a couple sermons or if you have multiple margin ribbons turned on.

Graham Criddle

We considered a couple different approaches and ultimately felt that a single margin line/ribbon indicating the span of verses that have one or more sermons is the best way to bring attention to your existing documents without cluttering your view , something we keep front of mind. This is especially important when reading passages that have more than a couple sermons or if you have multiple margin ribbons turned on.

Thanks @Anna Adent - that does make sense and I appreciate the clear explanation.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378022#Comment_1378022

I agree in part with your choice but I consider one of Logos's faults to be hiding detail and making the detail difficult to find. Did you consider using the initial display as you have but adding a click function to show the detail - say a maximum of 5-10 at a time? As it is, the overviews and the longest pericopes (usually from the office of reading) will quickly obscure the useful information.

Mark Barnes (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378001#Comment_1378001

We did consider that, and I think it would work fine for the example you cited.

However, I think the challenge there is that for some passages of Scripture, some pastors could have dozens of sermons. For me, that's likely to be especially true for Christmas passages.

Even if you don't have that, if you preach three to five verses at a time through a chapter, the lines would overlap quite a bit unless you always finish your sermon at a paragraph break, which doesn’t always happen.

In other words, while I think that multiple lines would work for some people some of the time (maybe even most people most of the time), I think that in many parts of the Bible it could end up looking a mess.

Mark Barnes (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378026#Comment_1378026

I'm not sure what you mean here, MJ. Right now the behavior for sermons that cover the same passage is that we show one ribbon and one icon. When you hover over the ribbon/icon you'll see a tooltip for ALL the sermons for that verse, as shown in Graham's tooltip.

Morgan

One issue I'd like to see resolved is a sermon preached on multiple occasions in the sermon metadata will show up multiple times in the visual filter.

MJ. Smith

I was suggesting that there was a simple solution to the "mess" mentioned in your response to Graham. If you limit the lines to blocks of 5-10 you avoid the mess and still keep the advantages of a visual display.

Aaron Hamilton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378027#Comment_1378027

There could be a small marker in the ribbon to indicate that one sermon ends at that verse. If the ribbon continues, that would indicate that another sermon has covered additional verses. This would give one a quick idea of approximately how many sermons are covered in one ribbon. Of course, this would not clearly identify where multiple sermons end at the same verse.

Jeffrey S. Robison

Yeah Bible Study and Sermon Visual Filters! Super excited for this.

Mark Barnes (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1378040#Comment_1378040

Thanks for the report. As a (nowadays) itinerant preacher, I feel your pain! We'll get it fixed.