As you learn how to use the new Logos Notes system, one of the questions you may have is how to use notebooks. Notebooks are basically the equivalent of note documents (or files) from the old notes system. In fact, we’ve brought all of your existing note documents into the new system as notebooks.

But the new system makes it unnecessary to use notebooks in some cases where it made sense to use note documents in the old system. This article gives some guidance on how to think about and use notebooks in the new Logos Notes.

Reasons to Use Notebooks

1. Share: You want to share your notes with others or work on a collaborative project together. It would be nice to eventually share notes independent of a notebook, but for now sharing is limited to notebooks.

2. Order: You want to order your notes in an order other than the available sort orders (currently date created and date modified). As we add more sort orders (like reference or resource), this will become less needed. Until then, a notebook is the primary way to control the order in which your notes are listed.

3. Display: You want to group your notes so you can control when they show up in your resources. Ideally, this wouldn’t be limited to notebooks. But it is for now on desktop. Web doesn’t give any granular control over which notes to show yet.

4. Organize: You want to create lots of notes and have them automatically organized. When you’re viewing a notebook, newly created notes will automatically be filed in that notebook. It’s currently not possible to have tags automatically applied to new notes. You can always bulk edit your notes when you’re done to add a tag and remove them from the notebook. In this way, notebooks can be a temporary tool for easier organization.

Once they are supported in the new system, label projects will be well suited for notebooks, particularly for reasons #1, #3, and #4 above.

Workflow notes are also well suited for notebooks, especially if you plan to share them.

Reasons Not to Use Notebooks

1. Type: You want to be able to see your notes as distinct from your highlights. Notes does this for you automatically.

2. Resource: You want to organize your notes according to the resource you took them in. Notes does this for you automatically.

3. Datatype: You want to organize your notes by the type of data your note is on (i.e., anchored to). Notes does this for you automatically.

4. Bible: You want to organize your notes by the book of the Bible you took them on. Notes does this for you automatically.

5. Organize: You want to organize your notes by some metadata you create. Tags are probably better suited for this (though see #4 above). A note can be in only one notebook, but can have as many tags as you want.

If you have lots of unnecessary notebooks that you want to get rid of (especially if you used per-resource note documents for your highlights), don’t delete the notebook. Currently, deleting a notebook also deletes all of its notes. In the future, we plan to have an option that deletes a notebook without deleting its notes.

For now, the best way to get rid of unneeded notebooks is by selecting multiple notes at a time (by holding down Ctrl/Cmd or Shift), which will bring up the bulk actions area. Select “No Notebook,” and then scroll down and select “Apply changes.” You can only select up to 100 notes at a time, so this method will probably be tedious for really large notebooks. In the future we hope to have a much easier option for getting rid of a notebook you no longer need.