Customer Reviews

Word Biblical Commentary CD-ROM: 58 Volume Edition

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4 star:		(1)
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The feel of a paper volume in your hand and a pencil in your ear as a ready-at-hand marker will never be replaced. However, in terms of a research tool electronic volumes cannot be equaled. This is particularly true of commentaries.

I will restrict my comments to the benefits of owning a commentary series in its electronic format because the odds are if you are interested in purchasing an entire commentary series you have enough understanding of WBC to know if it is your commentary of choice. Personally, one reason I purchased WBC was precisely because it was the best commentary available on cd-rom. I hope that in the future more commentaries will follow suite.

There are many superior features of this particular commentary series as it exists in electronic form:

Copy and Paste editing capability that also automatically footnote each copied section. This is probably one of the most superior features, because it allows for easy transitioning of the text to notes without having to re-type from the book.

Underlining/highlighting of the text in the commentary, itself. This replaced the ready-at-hand pencil with various means of underlining and highlighting the text, which are then immediately saved so that the next time you open the software your underlining is saved. It even has an underline style that mimicks the crooked pencil style done by hand, this is my favorite.

One particularly snazzy feature of the software that runs this commentary is that all scriptural references occurring within the text are displayed when you roll the cursor over the top. This saves innumerable hours looking up references in a separate book or cross referencing another software program. It is something of a biblical researchers dream come true.

Other features include searching capabilities to find a key word/s in the text, several zoom levels that allow you to quickly adjust the text size (larger to go easier on the eyes), and the ability to insert a marker and jot down comments and notes at various points in the text. This last feature is somewhat similar to leaving a comment in a cell in Excel.

One drawback to some of my searches has been a rather small search window that leaves me rather frustrated for its inability to adjust to a larger size. This and a few other minor quirks force me to give this a four star rating rather than the five stars. Although this is a superb purchase there is still some room for improvement.

Electronic versions of commentaries are more cost effective and more powerful than ink and paper. The hard copies will become a thing of nostalgia, although in my opinion they will never completely be replaced. I heartily recommend this commentary series and this electronic format in particular.