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Automatically Generate Announcement Slides from Planning Notes – with Optional Digital Signage Support

Problem / Current Limitation

Our church uses WorshipTools Planning to organize weekly services and Presenter to display slides during worship.

Our service hosts prepare announcements and upcoming events directly in Planning. These announcements typically include event titles, dates, times, locations and additional information.

Currently, Planning synchronizes service items with Presenter, but the notes and content entered in Planning cannot automatically be converted into presentation slides.

As a result, our presentation team has to manually recreate the same information in Presenter every week. This duplicates work, introduces the risk of inconsistent information, and makes last-minute changes unnecessarily difficult.

Feature Request 1 – Automatic Slide Generation from Planning (Core Requirement)

We would love to have the ability to generate Presenter slides automatically from content maintained in WorshipTools Planning.

Suggested functionality:

1. Allow users to mark a service item in Planning as an “Announcement” or “Generate Slide from Notes”.
2. Automatically generate one or multiple Presenter slides using the title and content of that item.
3. Support reusable slide templates with predefined formatting, fonts, colors and backgrounds.
4. Synchronize changes made in Planning with the corresponding Presenter slides, ideally automatically or through a manual refresh option.
5. Allow presentation operators to review and optionally adjust the generated slides without breaking synchronization.
6. Ideally, provide structured fields for announcements, such as event title, date, time, location and description.

Example workflow

* The service host enters three announcements in Planning for the upcoming Sunday.
* Each announcement contains an event title, date, time and description.
* Presenter automatically generates three slides using our church’s existing announcement template.
* If the service host changes an event time in Planning, the slide in Presenter is updated automatically.
* The presentation team no longer needs to recreate the announcements manually.

Feature Request 2 – Digital Signage Integration (Optional / Future Enhancement)

As a further enhancement, we would love to reuse the same announcement content for digital signage screens in our church foyer.

Ideally, the generated slides could also be distributed to digital signage displays independently of the active service presentation.

Possible implementation options:

* A dedicated digital signage output or playlist that runs independently of the main Presenter output.
* A read-only browser URL displaying automatically updated announcements in a continuous loop, suitable for smart TVs and digital signage players.
* Automatic export of announcement slides as images or video files for external signage platforms such as Yodeck.
* Alternatively, an API or structured JSON feed allowing third-party signage systems to retrieve the announcement content.

The signage output should ideally support scheduled publishing, automatic expiration of past events, customizable slide durations and continuous playback without requiring the main worship presentation to remain active.

Expected Benefit

This would create a single source of truth for church announcements:

Planning → Presenter → Optional Digital Signage

The planning team would maintain event information once, while both the worship presentation and foyer displays could use the same up-to-date content.

This would significantly reduce preparation time, prevent inconsistencies and simplify workflows for volunteer teams.

We have seen similar requests regarding Planning notes being accessible in Presenter. However, our main request goes one step further: converting Planning content directly into fully presentable, automatically synchronized slides.

Thank you for considering this improvement!
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Posted by Julian

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