WordSearch Bible Sets

WordSearch Bible Sets are a way of grouping multiple volumes so that they appear as one book.

Overview

Sets are a feature in WordSearch Bible. Sets are a way of collecting some of your library books which may have been sold or offered separately but need to be treated as a single book in the Library. For example a commentary on the New Testament may be written and sold as separate volumes such as Romans, Acts, John, Matthew, etc. but when used in the program they work better is they are treated as a single book. A Set could be as small as two volumes or as large as a hundred or more. A set will function well even when you do not own all of the volumes. The volumes of a set normally match physical books but sometimes multiple physical books could be combined in one electronic book without using sets. Of course some of the books you own are not part of a set, they are single books.

The WordSearch Bible app does not support the function of sets. It treats all volumes as independent books. This minimizes the size of downloads. Neither does https://www.mywsb.com the cloud server and online library.

The Book store also groups some volumes by sets. These may or may not be the same as the Sets feature described on this page. The book store also groups books by bundles which are usually not a set but occasionally they are the same. Portions of a set may or may not be available to be purchased separately.

The advantages of Sets

Sets are a useful feature of WordSearch. They are mostly present in the Commentaries category where individual volumes only cover a portion of a Bible. They can even be in the Bibles Category to connect an old and new testament into a complete Bible. For example the HCSB bible is done this way. However there is no reason that they can't be used in other categories as well.

If you open a book (volume) that is part of a set and you own more volumes then the Table of Contents for the book will list the contents of all the volumes you own. (If the TOC isn't open you can click on the TOC icon on the top list to open it.) You can browse the entire set and if you click on an entry that is not in this volume it will open and go there anyway. You can read the entire set as if it were one book. You can also follow links from one section of the book to another.

If the volumes in the set are designed to work with Bible verses then the Bible references can be directed to any book in the set which will be opened and displayed automatically once any one of the volumes are opened. The automatic syncing will work within an entire set.

Looking at your sets

Here is now to see the sets in your collection;

The first method

The first method uses "My Library List"

1. From the tools menu select "My Library List" and notice at the bottom that the number of books is listed and the number of volumes. The reason these numbers are not the same is due to sets. (If you have the same number then just keep reading and I'll let you know how to include a set in your collection even if you haven't bought a single book.)

2. If you scan down the list of books you may notice that some of the books have exactly the same name until they get to a hyphen. These books are part of the same set where the part of the book name ahead of the hyphen is the name of the set and the part after the hyphen is the volume name. Note a few books may have more that one hyphen, in which case the last one divides the set name from the volume name. You can now close the library list.

The second method

The second method allows you to see them in your Resources list in the Library section. Make sure the push pin is selected to keep the resource list on the screen. The library section contains three different views that are selected using the change options check box.

1. Click the check box at the top of the resources section. The three view options are category, author-title, and title-author. Both category and title-author will only display set names and single books that are not part of a set.

2. Select (click on) author-title choice. The displayed list now has icons on the left edge. The book icon is a single book while the round button is a volume in a set. Again the last hyphen in the line generally separates the set name from the volume name. Note that all of the books (volumes) in a set may not be listed together since each volume could have a different author. A single volume could be list more than once if it has multiple authors.

The third method

The third method also uses the resources menu or Library Screen and will work in any of the view options.

1. right click on the name of a book you are interested in and choose Properties from the menu of choices. This will open up a window with a description of the book. The main title is at the top of the window.

2. If that book is part of a set the set name will be at the top of the window and all of the volumes of the set that you own will be listed below a short paragraph that tells you that this book is part of a set. You can click on any of the volumes to get a description of that volume. Use the << Return to book list to get back.

Note that there is no indication in any of the three methods that will tell you whether or not you own the full set. You can usually tell that from the description on the web site.

Making a set

In the free eBooks you can download there is a set that is not built as a set. I call it McGarvey's commentaries. If you don't have an entry like this in your commentary category you can make a set for yourself. First be sure and download the McGarvey volumes from among the 200 plus free eBooks. Then:

1. Tap the options menu and select settings. The first entry is Startup and Paths. Note the Library books section to find out where your books are stored.

2. Use the file explorer to navigate to the folder found in step 1. There will be a folder for each of your books or sets of books. There should also be a folder called Sets. Click on that one. What you will see is a list of every set in your entire library. For the next steps you may need administration privileges to save the file in the Sets folder.

3. Use Notepad or another text editor (Notepad++ for example) to make a file like the one below.

[Properties]
LongName=McGarvey's Commentaries
ShortName=McGarvey
Category=Commentaries
[Contents]
Count=3
Book0=0-1401
Book1=0-1640
Book2=0-824

4. Save this file in the Sets folder under the name "McGarvey.set" (leave out the quotes). Now restart (or start) WordSearch and you will find this set listed in your Library, assuming at least one of the three books have been downloaded.

This will work as a single commentary like any other set in your library. Wordsearch basic users with only free ebooks will now have a set to explore. See WordSearch Bible Metadata for an explanation of the Book-ID and Category.

Recently I bought a bundle that included two commentaries, one called New Testament and one called Old Testament. I thought the names were a bit too general and didn't tell me much about the type of commentary. A look at the books themselves revealed that they had a better name. I created the following entry using a simple text editor and then saved it in the sets folder under the name NCWB.set and it worked like a charm. Now I have one book covering the whole Bible.

[Properties]
LongName=New Commentary on the Whole Bible
ShortName=NCWB
Category=Commentaries
[Contents]
Count=2
Book0=0-4881
Book1=0-4882

Sets are a wonderful feature but there are some limitations. For example the mobile apps do not currently support sets. Therefore a set cannot be used as the default bible or default commentary. The iOS mobile app can use an arbitrary volume for the default Bible and when you are viewing the reference you can view other versions as well so there is a good work around.

Limitations

Sets are a wonderful way to manage an encyclopedia with many volumes but there can be a limitation in that they have a set name that is too high level to permit finding some things you might be interested in. Let's suppose you have an interest in starting a new study on the book of Romans. One of the first things you are likely to want to do is to find out how many volumes you own that will provide resources for your study. Wordsearch does provide a few tools to help with this effort.

One tool you might try would be the Topics tool (Not present in WordSearch Basic). If you type in Romans you do get some answers but there is no way to determine if this is exhaustive and besides it will list a bunch of references you are not interested in such as Roman soldiers.

Another logical step might be to use the Filter box located in the top of your Resources tab. Filter box entries are very useful to find entries in the book names quickly. (I also use the Filter box in the TOCs of books to locate content entries, but I digress.) I typed Romans in the filter box and sure enough the list of books shortened considerably. I found 7 entries, one in Topics and 6 in Commentaries. I know I have more commentaries on Romans than that. Even if I switch to the author-title view I still only saw the same 7 entries even though that view displays both books and volumes. It seems that the filter only works with single book names and set names, no matter what view I use. If only I could disable sets temporarily I was sure I could find more entries. Here is how to go about it: (You may need administrative privileges to do these steps.)

1. Look in the Menu: Options and select settings to determine where your books are stored. Then exit WordSearch or WordSearch basic.

2. Use the file browser to traverse to the folder found is step one and scroll to the "Sets" entry.

3. Right click on sets and rename the entry to something else, like sets.save or aaaa. The name doesn't matter so long as its not sets and you can remember it for later.

4. Start WordSearch and take a look at your resources list. It is likely to look quite a bit different since there are no sets displayed any longer. Try out the various views and note what you see. (If it doesn't look correct, click the checkbox in Resources and select Refresh Library.)

5. Type in the word Romans in the Filter box and see what happens. Mine found 28 entries many of which have the same or similar name. I saw a lot of volumes named Romans. I am now confident that I have located all my resources on Romans, at least all that are devoted specifically to this book.

6. I would suggest that you now clear all open books if you have any open and then open all of the entries you found in your resources. Once they are all opened it will be easily to create a desktop or a collection for all your resources which you can then save for use later. How to create a desktop or collection is outside the scope of this discussion but could be in another tip. You could also just write down all of the book names for later use.

7. Now it is time to restore your sets so exit WordSearch, return to the file explorer window, and rename the Sets folder back to Sets.

8. Restart WordSearch and everything should be back to normal. Some automatic re-indexing is normal. Refresh the Library if you need to.

Perhaps some future version of WordSearch will make this easier, but for now it should have been an educational learning experience to see how Sets work.

More about Sets

Every possible set is automatically included in the Sets folder, even for books that you do not own. Thus when you buy a volume it will generally not download the set but will depend on the existing set file already installed.

The collections for a set are usually stored in a single folder in the library folder. The volumes in the set typically installed as separate folders within the one set folder. It is possible to rearrange your folder structure for sets you create to match this arrangement to keep the collection together if desired but it is not required.

When the application starts on a new day or when the library is manually refreshed the location of all the files will be found and a cache is built for the session to find them. Downloading new books will also kick off the refresh.

A set must all be in the same category. This seems obvious but evidently not to WordSearch staff. They recently release a set from Walvoord that includes both commentary and theology in 9 books. I would suggest that you strip the theology books out of the set by editing the sets file. This will leave you with 5 commentaries and 4 theology books. (You could also retitle it in the sets file while you are at it.) Just removing them from the set will automatically cause them to appear in the proper category but the cover images will not show for the theology books. (I have built some new ones by grabbing the images from Amazon's web site. If you need them please request on the discussion page.)

TOC

The TOC, table of contents, button reveals the contents of each book you own in the set. This is how you can easily get to the volume you want and perhaps to a specific section. For books with direct references to Bible books you will find a Bible reference menu item populated with only the books you own. This is also allows the program to sync the book, chapter, and verse for volumes you own in a set. One thing I have noticed about the sets you build yourself is that you may not be able to collapse the volume completely to only view the volume title but on sets that WordSearch you can usually do this. I have not yet figured out how to make the full volume collapse but that is usually not that important.

Book Covers

WordSearch Bible version 11 has the ability to display book covers in the Library View. The Sets feature supports book covers. This is done by having an image file (Usually a JPG) in the Sets folder with the same name as the set name. The file is generally a 100 x 150 pixel image.

In the absence of a cover image in the sets folder the software will follow the link to the first book in the set and if this has a cover image it will display that. If there is no cover image at all the software will display a generic image reserved for this purpose.