Moving from another program in one evening

One evening is enough to bring your songs over, if you do it in the right order. The order matters mainly for one reason: duplicates. Set aside two hours, with internet, on the computer where the old program lives. You need the Owner or Administrator role.

Before you start

Keep the old program installed. Don't remove anything until you've run a Sunday from WorshipPro.

Decide where to import:

• In the desktop app (Songs → Import…): OpenSong, OpenLP, EasyWorship, ProPresenter 7 and WorshipTools. This is usually the easiest, because it can often read the old program's folder directly.
• In the browser (Settings → Data import): OpenSong, OpenLP, EasyWorship, WorshipTools and Planning Center.

Step 1: add your songbooks first (15 minutes)

If you sing from a shared songbook, add it before you import: Music → Songs, Songbooks tab, Add to church. The import compares incoming songs with what's already in your church, by title, first line, CCLI number and songbook number. Doing this first gives you fewer copies, and songbook songs keep receiving corrections.

Step 2: load the data (15 minutes)

Details for each program are in Importing from another program on the computer. A few things to remember:

• close OpenLP before choosing its songs.sqlite file,
• in EasyWorship, export a .ewsx file first,
• for OpenSong and ProPresenter, fill in Songbook name. It becomes a tag on every song from this import, so you can find them later.

Click Load into preview. Nothing has been saved yet.

Step 3: go through the preview (30 minutes)

Work through the tabs in this order:

1. To check: possible duplicates. For each "↔ In the church: …" choose Same song — skip or Different song — add. This is the most valuable half hour of the evening.
2. Already in the church: leave these unticked, unless you really want a second copy.
3. New: scan the titles for junk, such as test songs or slide decks that aren't songs.

Use Tick visible and Untick visible for whole lists. Then click Import: ….

Step 4: check the result (30 minutes)

Don't check everything. Check a sample that would reveal a problem:

1. The count. Compare the number of songs in the program with Music → Songs.
2. Five songs, chosen on purpose: a long one, one with chords, one with a translation or special characters, an old one, and one you know by heart. In the desktop app, open each in Songs and look at the Slides view.
3. Verses and choruses. If a song came in as one block, open Edit and click Detect verses and chords.
4. A plan. Open an imported plan in Services. If it says "This plan is in the old format (import).", click Prepare for editing.
5. One real test. Add an imported song to a test plan and put it on the projector.

Step 5: drafts

Songs and plans from OpenSong, OpenLP, EasyWorship and ProPresenter arrive as drafts, with a tag for their source. From WorshipTools, songs are active right away.

Here's what to know about a draft song: it already works. It appears in search, in plans, on the projector and on phones. Draft is a marker meaning "nobody has looked at this yet". There's no way to change the status of many songs at once, so don't spend your evening on it. In the browser, set Status to Drafts in the song list, and use that list as a to-do list. Change a song to Active when you've checked it, starting with what you sing most.

Plans are different: publish the ones you need in Services.

One warning: Delete song on a draft removes it for good, and a plan that used it will show Song missing.

What doesn't come across

Apart from PDF sheets from WorshipTools, only song and plan text travels. Backgrounds, media and slide styles stay behind in the old program. Set up the look in Themes (How slides look), and add a Bible translation in Settings → Bible & offline.

If something went wrong

Running the same import again is safe. Songs brought in before show up under Imported earlier, so you can pick up what you missed without creating copies. Recent imports shows the history, and an unfinished import opens by itself.

The week after

Run one Sunday from WorshipPro with the old program still installed, as your plan B. Then give the team the short version of what changed: Rolling out WorshipPro.

What's next

• Importing from another program on the computer
• Tidying the song library