The Services planner was introduced in Visual Liturgy 4.0 to help churches get a sense of all their service planning over time. By seeing all your saved services at a glance, you can check the flow of a set of readings over a period of time, whether you are always singing the same hymns and songs or whether someone is doing too many jobs (or not enough)! With all that information available, organizing and making sense of it is paramount.
With such a lot of information to look at, one of the first things to do with the planner is to take out the columns that you don’t want to see. With the Services planner open, click on PLANNER in the menu bar and then CUSTOMIZE LAYOUT. A little box will appear on your screen.
To take out a column that you don’t need, click on the head of the column and drag and drop it into the little box. You can drag as many columns into that box as you like. If you want to take a column from the box back into the planner, click it again in the box and drag and drop back to the top.
Another useful feature is the ability to group services together by a particular column using the red bar. Click a column header and drag it into the red bar and you will find your services then get grouped by that column. You can drag several column headers if you wish.
My favourite layout is to drag the LOCATION column into the red bar, followed by the TIME column. The Services planner then groups all my 10.30 services together and all my 6.00 services together.
Another thing I do is to click the DATE column header once to sort the whole planner into date order. If I want to reverse the order, I just click it again.
If you want to save different layouts, you can do so via the PLANNER menu in the menu bar. The two commands SAVE LAYOUT and OPEN LAYOUT allow you to create any number of different layouts. You might want one that only shows your hymns, another that shows which people are involved in the service, another for your readings. We have provided some basic ones for you with Visual Liturgy when it first installs on your computer.