Logos 5: Difference between Highlighting and Visual Filters

Today’s post is from Morris Proctor, certified and authorized trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris, who has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos seminars, provides many training materials.

On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked questions similar to this:

I’ve discovered the Highlighting feature on the Tools menu and marked up the word love with the red highlighter pen. The challenge is that the red highlights show up in only one Bible. I want love to be highlighted in all my Bibles. How do I do that?

The key to this question is understanding the difference between Highlighting and another feature, Visual Filters.

The Highlighting feature marks up text in only one resource at a time. On the other hand, a Visual Filter is a search in as many resources as you want—one in which you tell Logos how to highlight the results!

This means you can search all your Bibles at once for the word love, and then select how you want the word highlighted in all your Bibles.

Let’s create this simple Visual Filter:

• Choose Documents | Visual Filter (VF)
• Name the VF something like English Words VF (A)
  
• Select Bible as the search type (B)
• Select All Bibles from the dropdown list (C)
• Select All Passages from the dropdown list (D)
• Type the word love in the Find box (E)
• Select Red Highlighter from the Formatting list (F)
  

• Open any English Bible to see the word love marked up in red (G)
  

• Add as many additional words or phrases as you’d like—place phrases in quotation marks, like “in Christ” (H)
  

Just remember, if you want a highlighting style to automatically mark up text in multiple resources, you want to use a VF, not the Highlighting tool.

If you liked this tip, you’ll enjoy the newly released Logos Training Manuals volumes 1 and 2, which together provide easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions for the vast majority of Logos features.