Your First ProPresenter Service: The Prep That Prevents Chaos

You just opened ProPresenter for the first time and Sunday is coming. There are a lot of buttons, some great features, and a few confusing menus. The natural move is to start building slides right away.

Don’t. If you build slides before you understand how ProPresenter works, you’ll do a lot of work twice, the slow way. Then you’ll get frustrated and stick with the small corner of the software you already know.

This is the prep order I use, and it’s the order that makes Sunday calm: learn the layout, set up your screens, use themes, bring lyrics in the easy way, and build a playlist you simply run.

Step 1: Understand How ProPresenter Is Organized

Two ideas make the whole interface make sense.

Slides Live in Layers

ProPresenter organizes what’s on screen into layers. At the top right, the output preview window and its row of red buttons show you the six layers.

When something is on screen that you didn’t expect, the layers tell you where it’s coming from. Knowing which layer you’re working in stops a lot of hunting.

Library → Playlist → Presentation → Slides

At the top left is your Library, where all of your content lives. From there you build playlists, and each playlist is one service in order.

A playlist is made of presentations: a song, your sermon, your announcements. And each presentation is made of slides.

Library, playlist, presentation, slides. Once you see it that way, you’ll stop hunting around, because you always know what level you’re working at.

For a deeper tour of this structure, watch Understanding Libraries, Playlists, Songs for Beginners.

Step 2: Set Up Your Screens Before You Make Anything Pretty

Screens come first, because every slide you build is designed for an output. Most churches have two very different screens:

• The audience screen is what the congregation sees.
• The stage display faces your team. It shows the current and next slide text and a clock.

The common mistake is treating these two the same. They can display similar information, but they do very different jobs.

Add a Local Display

1. Open Screens → Configure Screens.
2. Click the plus button.
3. Select a blue box. Blue means the display is local to your computer, and you’ll see several if you have several displays connected.

That adds the screen to either your audience or stage outputs.

Add a Livestream or Graphics Output

If this ProPresenter computer feeds a livestream, a video switcher, or another computer, set that up as an audience screen output too. Click the plus button again and choose the physical display, an NDI output, or another hardware output.

A multiview output is worth setting up here too. In my setup, it lets me see what goes to the livestream while also monitoring the main output and the stage display.

Step 3: Use Themes Instead of Styling Slides by Hand

New operators often think they need to style every slide by hand: font, size, color and drop shadow, over and over. Do not do that.

ProPresenter has a powerful feature called themes. A theme sets your slide layout, and you apply it across every slide in a presentation, like all the slides in a song. Want to change the look? Apply a different theme and every slide updates at once.

Build a theme for anything that needs a consistent layout:

• Worship songs. In my setup, I pick from a worship themes folder, and every slide of the song shares that layout.
• Sermon notes. I put each scripture on its own slide, then use a sermon theme that also displays the scripture reference.
• Lower thirds. In my setup, there are lower-third versions of these themes too.

If you’d rather not build all of this from scratch, my ProPresenter Quick Start Template comes with Looks, Themes, Macros and pre-built playlists, songs and sermon-note layouts, so you can drop in your own content.

Step 4: Get Song Lyrics In Without Typing Them

Please don’t type song lyrics in by hand. It’s slow and it invites typos. Ideally, ProPresenter pulls lyrics straight from SongSelect, and the process is easy:

1. Search the SongSelect library and select the song.
2. Click Import.
3. On the import screen, select the theme you want applied to the new song slides.
4. Assign the slides to a playlist.
5. Click Import.

Because you picked a theme during import, the song arrives already styled.

The Two-to-Four Line Rule

Keep slides to about two lines of text, maybe four. Cramming eight lines onto one slide overwhelms the room. Big, simple and readable is the goal.

If a slide came in too full, open the Reflow tab at the top. On a Mac, press Option-Return to break a line of text onto a new line.

Your slide layout should always come from the applied theme. If something looks off, select Theme at the top left and reapply it.

Step 5: Build the Service as a Playlist

Now bring it all together.

1. Create a new playlist and name it with the service date.
2. Drag the pieces of your service into it, in order.

A typical order might be: countdown, first song, announcements, next song, sermon. Top to bottom, that’s your service.

On Sunday, you’re not building anything. You’re running down that list, and the stage display tells your team what’s coming next.

Your Pre-Service Checklist

Before your first service, confirm each of these:

• You can explain library → playlist → presentation → slides and find each one.
• Your audience screen and stage display are set up separately in Configure Screens.
• If you stream or feed a switcher, that output is set up as an audience screen output (display, NDI or hardware).
• Songs and sermon notes use themes, not hand-styled slides.
• Lyrics came in from SongSelect with a theme applied.
• No slide carries more than four lines, and most carry two.
• The service is one playlist named with the date, in running order.

First-Service Mistakes to Avoid

Building slides on Sunday morning. The playlist should be finished before you arrive. Sunday is for running it.

Styling slides one at a time. If you’re changing fonts on individual slides, stop and apply a theme instead.

Treating the stage display like a second audience screen. Your team needs current and next text and a clock, not a mirror of the room.

Typing lyrics. Import them. Hand-typed lyrics cost time and bring typos.

Walls of text. Eight lines on a slide means nobody can sing along. Reflow it to two, or at most four.

Skipping the stream output. If the livestream or a switcher needs graphics, set up that output before you build content, not after.

Watch the Video

Here’s the whole walkthrough, from the layers and library to a finished Sunday playlist:

You can also jump straight to setting up screens, themes, or importing lyrics from SongSelect.

Keep Going

• ProPresenter for church: the complete training guide
• ProPresenter screen setup for church
• ProPresenter song lyric slides: import, format and best practices
• ProPresenter stream output for livestream graphics

More training is on the YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CrazyAmazingDesigns.