This is where things begin to get complicated.

I have gone through this with the Gospel of John for the sake of being able to illustrate the process here.  Some of what I actually did differs from what will be described below, for reason that the only applications available to me at the time were Google Docs and Google Sheets, and Android rather than Windows versions, at that. In reading this text, one will make constant reference to Dividing books into lessons - Gospels, Version 1, understanding that whereas that spreadsheet now appears in finished form, here I describe creating it from scratch.

For each year, for each of the books included in that year:

A. Preparation.

Divide the text into a table of three columns.
Put each paragraph of the text in its own row, in the middle column.
Number the paragraphs, in the first column.
In the third column, post the word count for each paragraph.

B. Diving in.

At this point, it is well to gather a lot of information that will be used down the road.

1.   Copy the above table, and paste it into a spreadsheet, with the paragraph numbers in column L.

2.  The remaining columns can be labeled as follows:

One can fill in these values, in these columns, for each row associated with a paragraph:

A - P, for “Paragraph record”
B - Hyphen
C - Em dash
D - Hyphen
E - The book number of the current book

Then, if a “hide” feature is available, one can hide those columns.

3.   For each paragraph:

Put the beginning verse’s chapter number in column F;
put its beginning verse number in column G;
put its beginning verse part in column H

(This will be either ‘-, a hyphen, or “b”.  Some paragraphs begin with the second part of a verse, in which case the verse part is “b.”  In all other cases, it’s the hyphen.)

Put the paragraph’s last verse’s chapter number in column I,
the last verse’s verse number in column J, and
the last verse part in column K.

(This will be either a hyphen or “a”.  Some paragraphs end with the first part of a verse, in which case the verse part is “a”.  In all other cases, it’s the hyphen.)

4.   To prepare for certain things to come:

a.   We can assign certain range names, constants and variables:

Label M1 “Days left,” and in N1 put this formula:
= [number of days allotted to the book]-countif(A1:A200,L)
There will be Lesson records (rows), designated by L in column A.
This field tells us how many lessons remain to be assigned.

Label Q1 “Words left,” and in R1 put the sum of “Words left.”

Label S1 “Target lesson length,” and in T1 put this formula:
= R1/M1
The target lesson length for remaining lessons in the book, will constantly change as lessons — of, inevitably, various word lengths — are assigned.  This cell will display the current value.

b.   We are approaching a point where it will sometimes be necessary to sort the data by multiple fields.  To attain a situation where the same can be accomplished by sorting on a single field, we do this:

Label Q2 “SORT,” and insert this formula in Q3:
= E3&"."&(if(F3<10,"00"&F3,if(F3<100,"0"&F3,F3)))&"."&(if(G3<10,"00"&G3,if(G3<100,"0"&G3,G3)))&"-"&100-E3&"."&if(1000-I3<10,"00"&1000-I3,if(1000-I3<100,"0"&1000-I3,1000-I3))&"."&if(1000-J3<10,"00"&1000-J3,if(1000-J3<100,"0"&1000-J3,1000-J3))
This combines into one field, all the data from columns F through K, in a form that will sort the same alphabetically or numerically.  A breakdown is as follows:

There are destined to be nested records; for example, a Lesson record will span several Paragraphs.  To keep them all in order by chapter and verse, it is necessary to do a "forward" or ascending sort on the beginning chapter and verse, and a "backward" or descending sort on the ending chapter and verse.  To accomplish all this in a single field, as it were negative values can be assigned to the ending chapter and verse, as is done now:

One can fill column Q with that formula.  It need never be “pasted as values,” because all the information comes from cells in the same row, and will never change if the rows are put in different order.