ProPresenter Song Lyric Slides: Import, Format & Best Practices

Lyric slides are the most basic thing ProPresenter does — and the thing most churches get wrong. Not because the import is hard, but because nobody ever told the volunteer running slides what “good” looks like: how many lines, what font, what background, and how to keep the text readable when it’s floating over a live video feed.

So let’s do both halves. First, the fastest clean way to get a song from the internet into ProPresenter as finished slides. Then the three formatting rules that separate slides people can sing from slides people squint at.

Prefer YouTube? Watch this video on the channel.

Grab the Lyrics From a Site With Clean Formatting

Search the song title plus the author plus the word “lyrics.” Google will offer you its own lyrics panel right at the top — I skip it. The formatting from that panel gets inconsistent when you paste it, and formatting is the whole game here.

Scroll down to a dedicated lyrics site like Genius or AZLyrics instead. The reason: those sites keep the song’s paragraph structure intact — verse, verse, chorus, each as its own block with consistent line breaks. Highlight everything and copy it.

That paragraph structure matters in the next step, because ProPresenter can use it to split your slides automatically.

Import Text From Clipboard

In ProPresenter: File → Import → Text from Clipboard. The import window that opens is doing three jobs, and each one is a decision:

How to split the slides. You can delimit by paragraph break — each verse or chorus block becomes one slide — or by line break, where you tell it how many lines per slide. For lyrics over video I set it to two lines per slide. For full-screen lyrics you can go up to four.

The presentation size. Just match it to your main output’s size.

Theme and library. Pick the look the slides inherit (a pre-built theme, or one you’ve made) and the library they’ll live in. This is where a ready-made theme pays for itself — the slides come in already styled instead of raw text you restyle later.

Hit Edit Before You Hit Import

Don’t just click Import — click Edit first. That window shows you exactly what every slide will look like, and it’s where you fix the thing that drives everyone nuts: the title defaults to the first line of lyrics. Paste in the real song title, add the author and CCLI info, and tell it whether to display the copyright.

The reflow editor at the bottom lets you clean up any slide that came in messy — merge a straggler line onto the slide above, split a slide that’s carrying too much text. Thirty seconds here saves you re-editing slides mid-service.

If you’d rather skip building themes entirely, my ProPresenter Quick Start Template comes with the lyric looks, lower thirds, and stage display already built — import your lyrics into a finished design ($65.99, one-time).

Rule 1: Pick a Font People Can Read

A decorative font might look great on the sermon graphic. On moving lyrics, readability beats style every single time — if someone in the back row has to work to read it, it’s the wrong font.

If you want a proven one, CMG Sans from Church Motion Graphics was designed specifically for church screens, and it’s free.

Rule 2: Two Lines Over Video. Four Full-Screen. Never More.

When lyrics sit over a live video feed as a lower third, two lines of text is the ceiling. Full-screen lyrics can carry four. Beyond that, you’ve lost the room.

I know the temptation, especially with hymns — put the whole verse on one slide and the operator has less to do. But that’s optimizing for the person clicking the slides instead of the people singing from them. A wall of text quietly tells your congregation the slides were built for the operator’s convenience, not for their worship — and that’s never the message you want a screen to send.

Rule 3: Backgrounds That Serve the Text

A background is too busy the moment it competes with the lyrics — too fast for the song, too high-contrast, too detailed. If you can’t instantly read the text, the background lost you the slide. (Church Motion Graphics gives away still backgrounds free if you’re not ready for a motion-graphics subscription.)

And for lyrics over video, add black bars behind the text: select the text box, go to Shape, and add a fill. Then refine it — set it to lines-only, try max line width, and pull the padding slightly negative so each line gets its own clean bar with a gap between. It’s a two-minute change that makes lower thirds readable over any camera shot.

The Recap

Copy lyrics from a clean source like Genius. Import with File → Import → Text from Clipboard, split two lines per slide for lower thirds (up to four full-screen), and always open Edit to fix the title before importing. Then hold the line on the three rules: readable font, line limits, backgrounds that stay out of the text’s way.

Related

• ProPresenter for Church: The Complete Training Guide
• ProPresenter Screen Setup for Church: Get Your Displays Working Right
• ProPresenter Quick Start Template

More ProPresenter training on my YouTube channel: Youtube.com/@CrazyAmazingDesigns.