UNITED REFORMED CHURCH
OpenLP: Adding custom slides to the plan for announcements or liturgy
Adding custom slides to the service plan

Custom slides are used to display an instruction or heading, eg 'Please stand' or 'Prayers' or liturgy, eg Communion responses
To use existing custom slides, click on the Custom slides bar of the library, choose the slide and click on ࣷ.
To create a new custom slide, click on the add symbol just below the C of Custom. Give your slide a meaningful title, including the date if it is intended to be used only once. Click on Add, add the text for the slide and click on OK.
Select a theme for the slide. There are three themes used here:
- St Andrew's titles for headings such as 'Prayers',
- St Andrew's instructions for items such as 'Please stand', and
- St Andrew's liturgy for items with liturgy spoken by the leader with or without responses from the congregation.
For liturgy, it may help to look at the item '+Liturgy example'. Select the theme 'St Andrew's liturgy'. If there are responses, start the first words with 'Leader:', and for the first response start with 'All:'.
For a long liturgy insert screen breaks as seems appropriate.

The responses should be in pale yellow, and to achieve that enclose them like this: {all}This is a response{/all}.
The default text is in the pale blue shade indicating words spoken by the service leader, but if necessary this can be indicated like this: {ldr}This is what the leader says{/ldr}. Note how {...} marks the start and {/...} the end of a coloured section.
Other formatting (colours, italic, bold etc) can be created using formatting tags. These are listed in the Settings menu under Configure formatting tags, but more simply, when editing an item, select the text to be formatted (eg Amen), right click on it, select Formatting tags and select the tag you want, eg All.
As an example:
{r}{it}red text in italics{/it}{/r} displays as red text in italics.
OpenLP tutorial
- Introduction
- Creating a service plan:
- The OpenLP desktop
- Creating a new service plan
- Adding songs to the plan
- Adding a new song to the library
- Adding Bible readings to the plan
- Adding slide presentations to the plan
- Adding images to the plan
- Adding sound or video items to the plan
- Adding custom slides to the plan for announcements or liturgy
- Making changes to the service plan
- Extracting song words from a service plan
- Running a service plan:
- Other matters: