If you use Apple’s Keynote presentation software to present outlines or visuals for your lesson or sermon, here are a couple tips to help you get the information you need out of Accordance.

Let’s say I want to put up a slide at the beginning of a sermon listing all of the passages I’ll be covering so people can bookmark them ahead of time. I use one of Keynote’s slide masters and enter the title “Today’s Scriptures.” In Accordance, I already have a window containing the passages I’ll be covering, so I just click in the text, use the Select All command to select everything, then choose References from the Copy As submenu of the Edit menu. I can also control-click to access the Copy As submenu via a contextual menu. When I go to Keynote and paste, I get a properly formatted list of references.

 

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Now, cute as the little girl from the slide master is, I need a more appropriate image. In the Bible Lands PhotoGuide, there’s an article on Inscriptions with images of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so I’ll turn there. Once I find one I like, I’ll simply drag the thumbnail from the PhotoGuide onto the image drop-zone of the slide.

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Voila! That slide is finished.

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Now, let’s say I want to create a slide that will enable me to highlight some aspect of a passage, such as the wordplay involving the word “house” in 2 Samuel 7. By using Keynote’s objects and builds, I can create a slide which appears to draw circles around certain words and arrows pointing from one word to another. But first I need to get the text into the slide, preferably formatted the way I want. Here’s where I’ll use Accordance’s Copy As Citation feature (accessed from the same menus as Copy As References). In the Citation settings of the Preferences dialog, I can specify that I want the reference for each passage I copy to appear below the citation preceded by an em-dash. I also have a host of other options for how the text gets copied out.

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Using a few simple tricks like these to get information out of Accordance in the form you want enables you to spend most of your time in Keynote building your presentation.