As a pastor, I write my sermons up in Microsoft Word. I’ve got a nice template I created and formatted to fit my 8.5×5.5 inch planner. I like to put the full text of verses I reference in my notes and would generally type them by hand. The likelihood of a typo was high, so I started copying and pasting from different Bible web sites. That was ok, except I am a little picky about my formatting, so I was spending more time than I cared to reformat the text to fit my template.
So I decided to write my own program to work with Microsoft Word. There were a few considerations, but the overriding theme was it had to work on both Macs and PC’s. A lot of the programming could have been quicker if I limited it only to the PC because I could have used a database like Access or sqlLite for the Bible texts. Instead, I had to use the lowest common denominator of text files. This made the initial opening of the BIble file a little slow (few seconds), but it’s very livable.
Bible Add-In
The features are pretty straight forward. You type in a reference as a single verse (John 3:16), a range (John 3:16-20), a list (John 3:16,18,23 Mark 11:22) and it will do its best to paste the verse into Word. The preview window show you what the 3 options (In Line, New Line per Verse, Single Paragraph) will look like. For my notes, I usually use New Line per Verse. For books, I usually use Single Paragraph. I never use the In Line option and it is in danger of being removed.
You select the version from the list. The name shown in the list is simply the name of the BIble text file. If you want more descriptive names, just rename the files.
So enjoy my BIble Add-In for Microsoft Word. Attached is a zip file with the Add-In and a collection of public domain Bibles. I put the add-in in my Word start-up folder. There is apparently a rule inside Microsoft to change the location of this folder with each version of Office, so I can’t tell you where it for sure. On the PC it is usually in c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\STARTUP (the Office11 name will change each version). On the Mac it is found at Applications:Microsoft Office 2011:Office:Startup:Word.
If you don’t want it to start up every time, you can open it as needed by selecting Tools>Add-Ins and add it to your list. Once you have it running, a new tool bar shows up called Bible. I don’t like where Office 2010 for Windows puts this, so I added a keyboard shortcut to access it.
You can put the folder with the Bible versions anywhere and the program will ask you where they are the first time it’s opened. These are very simple text files that have an 8 digit number followed by a space followed by the verse text. The 8 digits are 2 for the book number (01=Genesis, 66=Revelation), the next three digits are the chapter, and the last 3 are the verse. It’s not fancy and won’t work for Apocrypha books, and may not work for versions that only have Old Testaments or New Testaments – I’m not sure. There is support for Jesus’ words in red by surrounding the text with a <r> and </r>. See the KJV.txt file for examples.
Also, for you Mac fans, the program only works with Microsoft Office 2011 on the Mac. Office 2008 didn’t support VBA and Office 2004 was missing a lot of features in VBA that I took advantage of in 2011 to clean up the code.
You can get the zip file with the Add-In and public domain Bibles at:
chipscode 