Service Setup, Category Changes & Item Information

If my alliterative title isn’t as overtly obvious as previous posts, it could be caused by a cornucopia of categorical changes that couldn’t be cleanly condensed or clearly combined. Sorry, I got carried away. The point is, there’s a lot of great new stuff!

Setup Service Properties & Categories From Any Plan
You can now do all of your service setup directly in any plan! To edit your main service properties, click the pencil next to your service name. To edit people or note categories, click the gear icon that appears when you hover over the blue People or Notes headers. To edit Item Note categories, edit an item and then click the gear that appears when you hover over the Item Notes heading. To edit templates, click to create a new plan and then click “Manage Your Templates”. You will still see the “properties” button under each plan on the dashboard for a while, but eventually that will be removed completely in favor of these new methods.  Here are some screen shots of the new setup locations.

Reorder Categories

You can now reorder all of your categories (people, item notes, plan notes). Just edit them from their new locations listed above, and drag and drop! In addition, all categories and even your plans can be recovered up to 7 days after you delete them. Just edit the category and click the “Recently Deleted” section at the bottom to recover it.

Sticky Item Notes

As we’ve logged into people’s accounts to help them with various questions, we noticed that many churches have a lot of Plan Item Note categories. We also noticed that many of them frequently go unused and just take up extra room in the Editing Item box. To help alleviate this, we’ve added a new option called “Sticky” when you edit your Item Note categories. Sticky Categories will always show up when you are editing items, and non-sticky categories will stay out of your way until you click the new “add another note” button. So if you have item note categories that you rarely use, edit the category and uncheck the “Sticky” checkbox to streamline your item editing.

Plan Item Details

We’ve added a new field to all plan items called “Item Detail”. This new field is directly beneath item description and is a great place to put any detailed information. The Item Detail box includes Rich Text Formatting and is perfect for those of you who like to include lyrics or maybe the message outline or script since it gives you a much larger space to type.

Updated Sidebars and Buttons

You’ve probably noticed our gradual design enhancements over the last couple of upgrades and this release comes with another one. All of the sidebars have been given subtle graphic enhancements with softer colors, better spacing, and updated buttons & icons. We’ve also combined Upload an Attachment and Link to an Attachment into one new box, “Add an Attachment.” This cleans up the view a little, and more importantly, paves the way for some cool new kinds of attachments you’ll be able to add in the future.

Browse Custom Properties

When we updated the profile pages a couple of weeks ago, we changed the way you assign Custom Properties to individual people. Instead of browsing a potentially long list of properties, we changed it to a search box where you could type the name of the property directly. For many people, the new way is better than the old way, but for people who need to assign a large number of properties to a single person, it can be hard to remember the properties. So now we’ve updated the custom property search box to be even smarter. When you click to search, it will immediately show you all your property headings, and when you click one, you it will show you all the options so you can quickly assign them.

Stay Up to Date on Updates

That’s about it for now, but as usual we’re already plugging ahead on the next update. Occasionally we release small things in between major updates that don’t merit a notification box in PCO. One such example is our recent “Top PCO Easter Songs” post. So to make sure you get all the latest news about your favorite Online Worship Planning Software, follow us on Facebook or  Twitter @planningcenter!