“The One-Minute Apologist” (Dave Armstrong): Info. for Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet File

“The One-Minute Apologist” (Dave Armstrong): Info. for Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet File February 2, 2014
One-MinuteApologist (396x613)
(2-2-14)

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My good friend John O’Connor has created an excellent e-book version of The One-Minute Apologist in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format (xls). It contains many hundreds of convenient hyper-links and many other impressive features unlike all my other e-books. It’s available on my e-booksite for just $2.99.

The e-book version contains material that is not included in the paperback at all, such as source information for the citations (which I have documented on my blog). It also corrects some textual errors (some rather glaring) that occurred in the first edition. The hyper-linking creates an ease of access that is far more convenient than the paperback. John has also even added links to online Bible study aids. This is an amazing piece of computer technology: as user-friendly as it gets. It looks super-sharp too (I think, even better than the paperback book itself). One can go right to any section immediately, and find any of the 1300 Bible passages instantly in the text.

Here is a somewhat abridged version of the Instructions that come as part of the package, and also specific directions for extracting the zip file, and for downloading the entire package: all written by the creator of this version, John O’Connor:

Instructions For Use of The E-Book

In 2007, I purchased a copy of Dave Armstrong’s new book, The One-Minute Apologist. I was very taken by the concise format of the book and the potential it held for effectively educating people quickly on the basic tenets of the Catholic faith—especially in matters commonly misunderstood by Protestants. I conceived an electronic version of this book to be a wonderful tool for sharing the Catholic faith with interested people. If, for example, someone wanted to know why we call Mary the “Mother of God,” a simple two-page apologetics response could be provided easily to demonstrate the Scriptural basis for our belief.
Structurally, my electronic version of this book parallels the hard-copy book almost exactly. An attempt was made to lay the text out in a manner as similar to that of the book as possible, including page numbering. Although the textual page breaks do not correspond exactly to that of the book, each apologetics argument is—just like the book— only two pages in length. Ultimately, the 141 pages of the book are represented in the 61 files that comprise the body of the electronic version of The One-Minute Apologist.

The primary “enhancement” to the original book that this electronic version provides is found in the Excel spreadsheet file named “One-Minute Apologist.xls”. This file arranges the 1,300 Scripture references used in the book in such a way that they can be easily accessed electronically. Any Bible reference used in the book can be located across the entire work at the click of the mouse. Page-numbered hyperlinks provide clues for hard-copy reference if so desired. Additionally, “comments” in each hyperlinked reference cell provide clues to the greater context of the subject to which that Scripture reference refers. Finally, every reference is linked to an online Bible reference work called the “Blue Bible,” which allows the user to explore the Scriptural reference itself in the original Hebrew or Greek.


Zip File Extraction Instructions

Unlike Dave’s other electronic books (each contained in a single file), The One-Minute Apologist consists of a total of 65 files that have been bundled together into a single .zip file. When this .zip file has been downloaded, a special utility program will be needed to open the .zip file and extract its contents.

If you do not have such a utility program on your computer, a free download of the WinZip program is available on-line:

Free download of WinZip.

Explanation for how to use the WinZip program.

Once the files have been extracted, open the “One-Minute Instructions.doc” file for a brief explanation and guide to how this hyperlinked version of the The One-Minute Apologist functions.

You can also download an Excel Viewer or Word Viewer from Microsoft if your computer has trouble opening this file; or see an additional article about reading Excel files.
  
John later added new features to the already dazzling file:

Over the past couple months, I have been working on making the e-book version of The One-Minute Apologist even better. Briefly, here’s what I’ve done:

1) Throughout all of the files, I have hyperlinked all of the footnotes in the text to their corresponding place at the bottom of each page. Now, you can just click on the footnote number to see the footnote references.

2) Additionally, I have created a stand-alone “source” file for each of the 61 apologetics arguments that contains the full text of all the Scripture references used in each argument. All of the Scripture references in the apologetics argument (i.e., in the footnotes as well as throughout the text) are now hyperlinked to their full text. My reasoning for taking this exhaustive step is this: By having a “source” file for each apologetics class, the reader can now print off not only the two page argument from the book, but the full text of all the scriptures as well. That will make it easier, I feel, to share the material with others.

3) In the process of going through this a second time, I have corrected some of my own errors in the text as well as discovering a number of errors in the published book version.


Enjoy!


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