Cairo: Jesus in Egypt & God's Unusual Leaning
God seldom gives us all we need to understand, but He always gives us what we need in order to obey. The story of Jesus in Egypt as a boy offers a...
I use Evernote to help organize my piles of papers and files at work and home. From bills to blogs, from songbooks to sermons, from cards to conference notes, Evernote has helped me go virtually paperless.
(Maps courtesy of Satellite Bible Atlas)
Of course, the greatest benefit of this application is its ability to find what I stick in there. It has become my digital brain—with the added benefit that it never forgets.
Because of Evernote’s optical character recognition (OCR), I can find words I’m searching for in handwritten notes and even in photographs. Any word in any picture—I can find with a few clicks on my computer or iPhone.
This provides a nice benefit for Bible study.
I’d like to show you how to use Evernote to search your Bible Atlas.
These 6 steps will walk you through the process. Once you’re set up, you’re good to go for life.
Many new atlases today come with digital maps—either on an accompanying CD/DVD or available via digital download. For this example, I’ll use the excellent digital maps I downloaded from my Satellite Bible Atlas.
By the way, if your favorite Bible atlas doesn’t have digital maps, don’t worry. You can still digitize them.
You can even do this from within Evernote. Right-click on the image and select “Open,” and the image will open in your default image viewer. Any change you make to an image you’ve opened from Evernote will be saved in Evernote when you quit the image viewer application.
You can easily add your maps to Evernote from your desktop. There are a number of ways to add content in Mac OS X and Windows. My favorite way in the Mac platform is simple:
After your maps upload to Evernote, you’ll see them listed in your general notebook, something like the picture below (I like the “snippet view”).
First, select all of your maps, and then “tag” the group with a name. For example, you could tag them “atlas maps.” This tag is necessary when you start to search.
Then—and only then—click the field “Move to notebook” and select the notebook you just created. Your maps automatically file themselves in that notebook.
Now the hard work begins to pay off.
Type in the place name you’re looking for and magically, only the maps with that place name appear.
Some atlases name their digital files after the map numbers in the atlas. While that’s handy for the publisher, it’s not as convenient for us when we’re searching.
Say you’re searching for Jerusalem. You’ll find that on a LOT of your maps. Unless your maps have descriptive names, you’ll have to hunt until you find what you’re looking for.
Taking a few minutes to rename your maps according to period, region, etc., will reward you in the long run.
One thing I love about this system is that Evernote syncs with all my mobile devices, and I carry my iPad mini with me to church and look at maps there too!
Tell me what you think: What other ways can you think of to use Evernote for Bible study? To leave a comment, just click here.
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