Custom styles

Brian Roberg

I'm trying to get my bearings as I dive into Proclaim for the first time. I really like a lot of what I'm seeing, except for one thing. What I've seen so far is that there's little support for managing custom styles (or "custom templates" perhaps). Before I barrel forward, however, I wanted to make sure I'm not missing something.

From what I've been able to learn so far, it looks like the sequence for building up a service (while giving the slides a custom appearance) looks something like this:

1. I take a stock song item and change a handful of things (e.g. the lyrics font, the size of the title font, and setting the credits to show up on the title slide).
2. I "duplicate" that song item to get a new item with the same style adjustments, then change the title of the new item to pull in the correct lyrics from SongSelect.
3. I repeat Step 2 a dozen or so times to complete a weekend conference's worth of worship songs.

The crux of my question is this: what do I do when, having completed the above steps, I change my mind about what font I want to use for the song titles? How do I make that change once and have it apply to all the songs?

Another question that gets at the same issue is: how do I change the default styling such that when I click "Reset" in the Customize screen, it reverts to a particular custom style that I've saved rather than the stock style I started with?

I see two candidates for this sort of functionality, but I haven't been able to connect the dots:

• The "Style" button in the Customize screen seems to be a step in the right direction, but it looks like its scope is limited to text formatting; it doesn't provide a template for a whole song.
• There are whole bunch of fancy styles I can use when I create a new service, which is great. But how do I create a new one of those styles which incorporates my customizations?

Custom style management like this is a pretty core part of other presentation software I've used (e.g. Keynote). I don't see it in Proclaim. Am I just missing something?

Thanks for guiding a newbie!

Rebecca

You're not missing anything.  It's just not there.

The built-in backgrounds have fonts and layouts and such associated with them and function like themes/templates.  But any user-uploaded backgrounds just default to a big, black, un-fancy font, and there's no permanent way to change it.  Changing the background resets all the other formatting options, as well.

You have to apply the formatting one item at a time, I'm afraid.  At least, I haven't discovered any way around it.