Let's take a look at adding a Planning Center Plan to ProPresenter. We'll also look at several settings so you can better understand how those options work.

We assume you already know how to use Planning Center Services, so we won't go into much detail about how to do things there. We will explain a few things that require a clearer understanding so that you know how they work with ProPresenter.

The first step will be adding a Planning Center Plan to ProPresenter. Click on the ＋(plus sign) next to Library and select Planning Center Service from the menu.

This opens a second window that shows all your available Plans. This is where you will see the effects of checking or unchecking Show Historical Service Plans. Since Show Historical Service Plans is currently checked in Settings, you can see the Plans from January as well as the two upcoming Plans in April. If we uncheck that option, we will only see the two upcoming Plans for April. The Select a Plan window will reflect the organizational structure of your Service Types and Plans within Planning Center Services. If you have multiple folders to organize services, you can navigate through those folders to find the plan you need to add. If a Plan appears to be missing, click the Refresh button to update the list.

We will be adding the April 4, 2021 Plan to ProPresenter. We have already added the song "Who You Say I Am" to our Plan in Planning Center without any attachments. We have also downloaded that same song from SongSelect so it is in our ProPresenter library. Click the Plan you want to add, then click Select. ProPresenter will then add that Plan as a playlist.

After selecting the April 4, 2021 Plan and clicking Select, it is added to ProPresenter and the one song in the order is shown. A Planning Center playlist can be identified by the blue icon to the left that uses the Planning Center logo. We'll take a look at a more complex Plan later, but for now, this one song is all we need.

We can now take a look at the Match Presentations in the Library setting. 

When a Planning Center song is successfully linked to a ProPresenter presentation, it will look like a normal presentation in your playlist. The only difference is the second title bar across the top of the slide area. This part shows the Planning Center item name and lets you unlink a presentation. You may need to unlink a presentation if you need to manually link a different version. We'll look at that step a little later.

If a song can't find a match, it will show the drop area. This indicates that nothing has been linked to that item and you need to drop a presentation from the library or a media file from the Media Bin or your hard drive onto it. If you just need it to function as a placeholder, click Cancel to remove the drop zone. The Cancel button will change to "Link...", which you can click later when you are ready to link an item to it.

Now you need to know how to link an existing presentation in your library to a Planning Center item that didn't get linked or that you are changing to a different presentation.

Start by using Search to find the presentation you want to add. Once the search shows the correct song, click and drag it into the drop zone, and it will link to that item.

Let's take a closer look at the top left corner where the song name is shown. You can see that the top line matches how the item is entered on Planning Center, and the second line matches how the title was entered in ProPresenter. The Planning Center presentation name is what will be shown in the playlist after you link a presentation.

Let's take a quick look at a more complex Planning Center Plan before moving on.

We have added a bunch of items to our Plan on Planning Center. Since the Automatically Check for Plan Updates option is enabled in Settings, ProPresenter lets us know when there are new changes. Click on Update Available to synchronize the changes to ProPresenter.

After downloading all the new Planning Center items, the playlist in ProPresenter updates and shows all the new items. If any songs match, they will link automatically. Since there are no other songs in our library, no additional items are linked. The one song we did link remains linked.

We have added some new things to this Plan that we haven't looked at yet. Items with no icon next to them and bold names are Headers. Headers in a Planning Center Plan and ProPresenter playlist serve the same purpose of organizing your order; however, Headers in a Planning Center playlist cannot be edited. This means you can't change the color or link the header to a timer. We'll cover how to make this work later. The countdown and sermon items also have a different icon next to them. This icon indicates an item that has not been linked to a ProPresenter presentation or media file.

Let's take a quick look at linking a media file before moving on to the next section. Linking a media cue is the same as linking a presentation. Drag the media file from the Media Bin or your hard drive into the drop zone to link it. The name in the playlist will change to the media cue's name, so if you have really long file names, you might want to edit the name before linking it. You can also update the name in the Inspector. The icon in the playlist also changes to indicate that the item is a media cue.

Let's take a quick look at converting your Planning Center Plan into a standard ProPresenter playlist.

Right-click on the Planning Center Plan and select Convert to Standard Playlist. This unlinks the Plan from Planning Center and gives you more control over the playlist content. As mentioned earlier, it also lets you manipulate the headers.

Once you have converted the Planning Center Plan to a Standard Playlist, you can add new items and edit headers. The playlist is no longer connected to Planning Center, so changes will no longer be synchronized. You can't convert a standard playlist back into a Planning Center Plan, so if you did this accidentally, you will need to add the Planning Center Plan again.

Let's also take a look at the options for automatically uploading and downloading presentations and media. Each Planning Center membership tier has limited storage. If you have a lower-tier plan, you may want to disable both options, or at least disable automatic upload so larger files don't add to your storage. You can always attach files directly to a song on Planning Center.

We're in a new Planning Center Plan now. This service order includes the same song we've been working with, plus a Sermon presentation and a single media cue. Since we currently have Automatically Upload Presentations and Media enabled in Settings, all three items will be uploaded as attachments to their items in the Planning Center Plan.

You can click on each item in your Planning Center Plan and see what is attached. If it's a file type Planning Center can preview (like an image or video), you can also preview the file.

When you unlink an item in ProPresenter, it does not remove the attachment from Planning Center. A new linked item will be uploaded and added as an additional attachment. You will need to manage your attachments directly on Planning Center to ensure that you have the correct version of a file attached to an item. We'll see why this is important in a few seconds when we look at downloading attachments.

For this section, we have removed the song and the sermon presentation from our library and deleted the image. We also deleted the Planning Center Plan in ProPresenter so we can start fresh.

Before we begin, we'll check Planning Center to make sure all the attachments are there. The song and sermon both have an attached .pro file that was uploaded in the previous step. Our media cue also has two attachments available so that we can see how that works.

After adding the Planning Center Plan as a new playlist, the two presentations were downloaded, added to our library, and automatically linked to the items in the Planning Center Plan. The second attachment is the one that is downloaded. If you have multiple files attached, the most recent item will be downloaded.

If multiple ProPresenter .pro files have been linked to a song in Planning Center, the wrong song may download to ProPresenter. If this happens, remove the other .pro attachments from that song in Planning Center.