Friday, March 07, 2008

Adding some power to your Vocabulary Lists in Logos...

Many of you are familiar with the power of Vocabulary Lists in the Logos Bible Software. This feature allows you to map all of the Greek words in a pericope, a book or an entire section of Scripture and then list those words either alphabetically or by frequency. This can become an indispensable tool for helping determine "key words" within a book. I have posted about how to use this tool in the past and have a video tutorial available to show you the basics here.

Marking Key Words in the Vocabulary List

When you display these Vocabulary Lists by word frequency in descending order you can then scan the list for possible keywords. But once you find them, what do you do with them? Well, the first thing I do once I find a possible key word in the list is MARK IT.

1. Double click any word in the list to edit it

2. Move your cursor in front of the Greek word and insert an asterisk (*) in front of the word

3. Now resort the list (right-click on the book name at the top of the list) alphabetically.



Now that there is an asterisk in front of these words, they will come to the top of the list when you sort it alphabetically. The cool part is that this doesn't affect the frequency listing at all! If you resort by frequency, the words are still in there original position in the list.

The beauty of all of this is that now when you sort these lists, you can see all of the keywords together at the top rather than having to scan down through the list to find them. Once they are all together, you can use them to search the text, do word studies and all kinds of cool stuff!

Try this out - you will love it! Happy (word) hunting.

NEXT: How to do searches from your Vocabulary Lists

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks! Was driving me nuts to not be able to sort. I was about to open up the XML and write my own sorting script. The UI could have some clue somewhere that sorting is available. Alas, probably my fault for not finding and watching the always excellent training videos.