Master the 15 Document Types: Part 1

Note-taking remains central to both personal Bible study and sermon preparation. Whether you’re journaling through the New Testament in your daily devotions, preparing to lead a small group, or doing research for your dissertation, Logos offers powerful, intuitive note-taking tools to improve every facet of your Bible study.

The documents menu in Logos 5 gives you 11 different document types (and Documents.Logos.com reveals four more). Each one works a little differently, so you’ll always have the right tool for the job.

To demonstrate the power of these documents, we created a Faithlife Group with samples of each document type—join right now to see them all!

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There are also four other document types that don’t appear in this menu, but may appear at Documents.Logos.com. Over the next two weeks, we’ll explore the capabilities of each—starting today with the first six types listed in the documents menu.

1. Bibliography

Logos 5 makes it easy to create, edit, sort, and print (or export) bibliographies for publication or personal reference. You can add citations from seven source types (I use “history” most often).

Students, rejoice—if you build a bibliography in MLA only to learn that your professor expects Turabian, don’t worry—you can switch between styles with a click.

Exporting or printing a bibliography is easy, too: just click the panel menu or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl/Command + P.

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2. Clippings

When you come across an insight you want to remember, turn to clippings—the fastest way to store definitions, ideas, observations, and other fragments of text.

It’s easy: create a new clippings document, then right click text to set it aside for later. The clippings document will remember exactly where you found everything, so you can cite all your sources. You can even add tags (to make clippings searchable) and notes.

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3. Notes

Logos’ notes make it easy to mark up your books. Just like writing in the margins, you can add your own thoughts and observations to personalize every book in your library—except in Logos notes, you’ll never run out of writing room.

Notes and clippings are very similar. Personally, I use clippings to gather insights from my library into one place while I study or prepare to preach. I use notes to store a searchable copy for a final product—like a sermon manuscript, a completed article, or a position paper.

Notes attached to Scripture references will place an inline icon across all your devices. Hover over it to preview the note, and click to open it.

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4. Passage list

This is the most helpful document when you’re studying systematically through a single topic or theme. Use search to find all the references of a specific word or phrase, and store the results for analysis.

The passage list really shines when you toggle over to memorization mode—you can use it to memorize a list of verses by progressively hiding more words as you become more familiar with the text.

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5. Prayer list

Prayer lists help you keep your promises to pray for friends or family. You can add requests, set the frequency, and share your lists in a Faithlife Group or at Documents.Logos.com. You can even record answers, so you’ll always have a record of God’s faithfulness in your life.

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Join the Logos Sample Documents Faithlife Group to see more examples of all 15 document types.

We’ll cover the remaining document types next week—stay tuned for part 2!

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Written by
Ray Deck III

Born in WV, Ray escaped to North Carolina at a young age. He came to Logos after an 8 year stint at a faith-based nonprofit in New York. When he is not assembling sequences of words, he’s probably running, surfing or shooting skeet, but you should probably go look for him. He has a terrible sense of direction and is probably lost.

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Written by Ray Deck III
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