What a Brand-New Logos User Should Know — A Conversation with Morgan Dybing
How a stay-at-home mom pursuing her Master's at Redemption Seminary used Notes, Visual Filters, Clippings, and Collections to go from brand new to genuinely equipped in Logos.
Most of my interviews are with long-time Logos users — pastors, scholars, researchers who have spent years inside the platform and built workflows that would impress any librarian.
Morgan Dybing had been using Logos for about three months.
And this interview might be the most useful one I’ve done.
Not because Morgan knew more than the others — she was quick to say she didn’t. But because she was new enough to still remember what was confusing, present enough to ask the right questions out loud, and honest enough to say “I don’t fully understand that yet” in a way that made room for the rest of us to admit the same.
Morgan is a stay-at-home mom who recently started her Master of Arts in Biblical Studies at Redemption Seminary — a fully online, accredited seminary built around Logos. She had the Max subscription but wasn’t sure what she had. She was using the platform daily for coursework but navigating mostly by instinct. She came into this interview with a list of real questions and left with a Logos workflow that actually makes sense.
She comes from somewhere you might recognize.
Morgan found Redemption Seminary through Dr. Michael Heiser — one of the founding board members. She was drawn to the program not just for the academic rigor, but for the structure: asynchronous coursework she could do on her own schedule as a stay-at-home mom, paired with one-on-one weekly sessions with a PhD mentor. No physical classroom to uproot her life for. No one-size-fits-all exam culture. Just real theological study, at a real pace, built around a real life.
That context matters for this interview — because Morgan isn’t approaching Logos as a hobby. She’s in it daily, for coursework, for her degree, for serious study. Which means the features she asked about aren’t theoretical. They’re practical in the truest sense.
Notes vs. Clippings — and why the answer is “it depends.”
Morgan had already figured out that Clippings were useful — she’d started using them after watching a previous interview. She described her approach: create a notebook-style title, then drop selected passages into it. Simple, effective, practical.
What she didn’t know was how Notes differed — and whether they were better.
The honest answer is: neither is universally better. But they serve different purposes. Clippings are fast. You right-click, select a passage, and it’s saved. Notes are more integrated — they live inside the Dynamic Toolbar and can be anchored to a specific Bible reference, which means a little Post-it marker appears right in the text wherever you’ve left a note.
That integration is the real win. If you’re doing a study in Obadiah and you want your notes to surface right there in the text as you read — Notes is your tool. If you’re just collecting material for a paper or a sermon — Clippings is faster.
One thing Morgan surfaced that’s worth knowing: you can hyperlink any line from any resource in your Logos library directly into a note. So even if you can’t anchor a note to a commentary (only Biblical references can be anchored), you can paste a link to the exact page of that commentary into your note. That’s not a workaround. That’s actually elegant.
Visual Filters — the feature most new users walk right past.
Morgan had downloaded one Visual Filter from the public library — one that highlights the Divine Names of God. She was using it, but wasn’t sure how most people use them or what else was available.
We walked through several. A few worth knowing:
Speaker = God — shows every time God is speaking in the Old Testament, highlighted in red. Essentially the “red letters” of the OT. You can build this yourself in about thirty seconds.
Imperative Verbs — highlights every imperative verb in the Biblical text. Whenever God (or anyone) tells the reader what to do, it jumps out visually. This one changes how you read commands in Scripture.
Pronoun plurality — shows whether “you” in a given verse is singular or plural. This comes up constantly in Paul’s letters and is almost invisible in English translation.
The cheat code Morgan and I discovered together: when you want to create a Visual Filter for a specific Hebrew or Greek word, don’t try to type the word yourself. Right-click the word in your text, open the Word Study, and copy the exact lemma form from there — then paste that into your Visual Filter. It’s far more precise than guessing at the spelling.
Collections — what they’re actually for.
Morgan asked one of those clarifying questions that I wish more new users would ask: “What’s the difference between Tags and Collections?”
Tags help you organize and find resources in your library. Collections help you limit Logos searches to only certain books. They answer different questions.
Tags ask: What do I have, and how is it categorized?
Collections ask: When I search, which books should Logos look in?
If you’re writing a term paper for a specific course and you only want to search through the books assigned in that course — you make a Collection. If you want to see which resources in your library are rated four stars or higher by the broader Logos community — you use library filters. Both have their place. Neither replaces the other.
One more thing Morgan shared that I think deserves its own line: Logos already has robust built-in categories for most of your library. You don’t have to tag everything from scratch. Start with prioritizing your resources in the key categories — Bibles, commentaries, lexical works, dictionaries — and let the community ratings surface what’s most trusted. That alone will take you a long way.
Three Logos tools worth exploring alongside this interview.
Everything we talked about in this conversation is available inside Logos right now. Here are three resources worth exploring as you watch or re-watch the interview:
1. Logos Clippings (built-in feature)
Clippings are already part of your Logos installation — no extra purchase needed. To access them, look for the Clippings panel in your sidebar or right-click on any passage and select “Add Clipping.” This is the fastest way to build a personal research library inside Logos, and it’s exactly what Morgan was already doing before she even knew what it was called.
2. Visual Filters (Public Library)
You can browse hundreds of community-created Visual Filters for free inside Logos. Open the Visual Filters panel, select “Public,” and go shopping. Look for filters like Divine Names, Imperative Verbs, and Speaker = God to get started. Once you see what’s possible, you’ll start wanting to build your own.
For a new user doing serious biblical study — especially seminary coursework — a reliable dictionary is one of the most important reference tools you can add to Logos. The Lexham Bible Dictionary is a comprehensive, scholarly, and completely free resource available in Logos. It covers people, places, theology, and background across the whole Bible, written by a broad team of evangelical scholars. Morgan was already navigating her coursework daily inside Logos; this is the kind of reference tool that makes that navigation far more confident.
A gentle challenge for this week.
If you’ve been putting off exploring Logos because you feel like you’re not advanced enough — let Morgan’s story reframe that for you.
She had three months in the platform. She had real questions and no embarrassment about asking them. And in fifty minutes, she walked away with a workflow that makes her daily study more organized, more visual, and more connected to the text.
Here’s where to start this week:
Open your Clippings panel and create one notebook for the passage or book you’re currently studying. Just one. Drop three things into it this week.
Browse the Visual Filters public library. Search for “Speaker = God” or “Imperative Verbs” and enable one while you read your Bible this week. See if anything jumps out at you that you would have missed.
If you have a lot of resources in your library, open your Library panel, filter by “Community Rating: 4 stars and above,” and spend five minutes seeing what surfaces. You might be surprised what you already own.
You don’t need to be an expert to use Logos well. You need to be curious, and willing to ask the right questions. Morgan showed us what that looks like — and this interview is worth every one of its fifty minutes.