Creating a Planning Center Song Sequence and converting it to a ProPresenter Arrangement can be extremely helpful for quickly setting up songs in ProPresenter, but there are a few things you need to be aware of while you are creating the sequence. We aren't going to go into editing an arrangement or creating custom arrangements too much; Planning Center has great documentation to help you learn more about these features. We'll point out a few specific things, but remember, this is not a how-to for using Planning Center.

We'll start from the Songs tab and click Add a song in the top right corner of the page. If you are working in an existing Service Order, you can also get to this through the Song or Item in your playlist when you click to link a song.

Let's take a look at "Who You Say I Am" again, this time as a brand new song. We searched for this song and saw that the first three results are all from Hillsong. If you aren't familiar with this song, the first version is the live version, and the second is the studio version. The third is from Hillsong Kids. All three are the same song, but the arrangements/sequence might be slightly different, so it's helpful to know which version your worship leader will be using.

We want to use the studio version of this song, so we'll click on the second one with the white album art. After you click on the song, it will spin for a few seconds while it processes some things in the background.

The next window you see gives you access to some additional settings you can configure before adding the song. We aren't interested in any of these other options, so click Submit. If you want to change the name of the Arrangement, you can do that here. For example, you might want to call this Hillsong Worship - There is More (Studio Sessions) so that you know which album this is based on.

Let's take a second to clarify a few terms. In Planning Center, we use the terms "Arrangements" and "Sequence" for songs. In ProPresenter, we use the terms "Arrangements" and "Groups". A sequence in Planning Center is just the order of groups in an arrangement in ProPresenter. Don't let the term "sequence" confuse you here.

As you can see in the image below, we have created one arrangement called "Hillsong Worship". The sequence was automatically created for us based on the album we chose in the first step above. The white box with the green word "Arrangement" is for storing any related files you might have. We're only interested in the list of Arrangements in the column on the left.

If you click on the sequence, you will see the Edit Sequence box open. This is where you can change how the song is structured. We'll come back to this, so don't forget how you got here! For now, we just want to point out how things are named in the left column. These names must match your Groups in ProPresenter exactly (including capitalization). For this next part, let's jump into ProPresenter for a little while.

We have just imported "Who You Say I Am" from SongSelect. As you can see, there are a few items from the Planning Center Song Sequence that don't exist in the song itself.

You want to make sure you have identical group names in both Planning Center and in Pro7. In this case, we have Intro, Instrumental, Vamp, and Ending in the Planning Center Sequence but not in the song in ProPresenter. You have two options. You can create new slides in ProPresenter with identical group names, or you can remove them from the sequence in Planning Center.

A common issue is that SongSelect names a single chorus "Chorus 1" in most songs. Planning Center will name a single chorus "Chorus". Since these don't match, it won't create an arrangement. Right-click the Chorus 1 group in ProPresenter and rename it to Chorus. You can also manually create a new sequence group called "Chorus 1" and add it manually, but if you use the tokens generated automatically, it won't match properly.

If items exist in a Planning Center Sequence that do not exist in the presentation in ProPresenter, it will not create a new arrangement, so you must make one of the two decisions about what to do with sequence items.

For this demonstration, we chose the first option: add four slides and assign the missing groups. If a group does not exist, you can create a new group; just make sure you give it the exact same name that you see in Planning Center. Add the sequence as a new arrangement in ProPresenter and select it immediately. Since this presentation already exists in our library, the arrangement is added to that presentation, updated in the Library, and linked to the item in the Planning Center service.

Songs sometimes get added to a plan more than once. Your band may play the long version of it to start your service and then play just the Chorus and a Verse at the end of your service. You can link two sequences to the song in Planning Center and select the correct sequence for each part of the service. When you add the Plan to Pro7, it will create a new arrangement for both sequences and select the correct group in the playlist.

Once a sequence has been converted to an arrangement in ProPresenter, you can interact with it the same way you would any other arrangement that you have created in ProPresenter, whether that presentation is in a PCO playlist or not.