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How to use CSW

Planning a meeting, running the slides, and the screens your team sees

Service Order

A Service Order is your plan for the meeting: the songs in the order you will sing them, with everything else — prayer, testimony, the message — in between.

  1. Open Service Order from the home screen.
  2. Start a new order and name it for the meeting — the date, or "Sunday morning".
  3. Add a block for each part of the meeting. A song block searches the whole book by name or number; other blocks are for prayer, offering, the message, anything you like.
  4. Give blocks a length if you want to see what the meeting adds up to.
  5. Save it to your account so it reaches every device you sign in on, and share or print it for the team.
This is the part that saves the most time on the day: once an order is saved, the phone remote and the stage screen both read from it, so nobody hunts for the next song.

Slide Show

Slide Show puts the lyrics on the big screen, one verse at a time, for the congregation to sing from.

  1. Open a song, then start Slide Show.
  2. Move through the verses with the arrows on screen, the arrow keys on a keyboard, or by swiping on a touch screen.
  3. The layers button shows every slide of the song at once, so you can jump straight to the chorus or a later verse.
  4. The sliders button holds the display settings: text size, a light or dark background, and the language view.
Language view
  • A — the song in its own language only.
  • a — the transliteration or translation only.
  • A/a — both, one line under the other.
  • A|a — both, side by side. Wide screens only.
Larger text beats more lines. Set the size once from the back row of the hall — it is remembered for next time.

Phone remote

The phone remote changes the slides from anywhere in the room — at the keyboard, on the platform, or beside the sound desk. Nobody has to stand at the computer.

On the computer showing the slides
  1. In the Slide Show, open the display settings and find Remote Link.
  2. Press Start Hosting. A session code appears — it is new each time.
On the phone
  1. Open CSW and tap Join Remote on the home screen.
  2. Type the session code and press Connect.
What the four tabs do
  • Control — next and previous slide, the language view, light or dark, and one-tap messages to the stage screen.
  • Schedule — the Service Order for this meeting. Tap any song in it to put that song on the screen.
  • Songs — search the whole book and send up a song that was never in the plan.
  • Stage — the message and the countdown shown to the singers.
Both devices need internet, but they do not have to be on the same wi-fi — a phone on mobile data works.

Stage screen

The stage screen is the monitor the singers face. It shows the verse being sung now, what comes next, the time, and any message you send them — so the congregation's screen stays clean.

Two ways to open it
  • From the same computer — press Open Stage Screen in the display settings, drag the new window onto the stage monitor, and press F for full screen.
  • From another device — a tablet or spare laptop at the front: open christiansongsweb.com/stage.html and type the same session code.
Talking to the singers
  • Send a message in one tap — Wrap up, 2 min left, Skip to chorus — or type your own. Clear takes it away.
  • Set a countdown to a time and the stage screen counts down to it. Useful for starting on the hour.
In the Mac app the stage screen opens as its own window instead of a browser tab. Everything else works the same.

A Sunday, end to end

How the four pieces fit together on a normal meeting day.

  1. In the week: build the Service Order and save it.
  2. Before the meeting: open the first song on the projector computer, start Slide Show, press Start Hosting and write the code down.
  3. Give the code to whoever is leading — they join from their phone.
  4. Open the stage screen on the singers' monitor with the same code.
  5. Through the meeting: the leader moves the slides from the phone, and the sound desk can send Wrap up when time runs short.

If something is not right

  • The code will not connect. Check that both devices have internet, and that the code is typed exactly as shown. A new code is made every time hosting starts, so an old one will not work.
  • The stage screen is empty. It is waiting for the Slide Show. Start a song on the main screen and it appears.
  • The phone is showing an older song. Leave the remote and join again with the same code.
  • A box asks you to refresh. That is a new version of the app. Press Refresh when you are not in the middle of a meeting — never during one.
Still stuck? The Support page has a way to reach us, and it helps to say which device and which screen you were on.