Airtable for Planning Teaching Programs

What tools do you use to plan out your teaching and preaching?

One of the tools I’ve used the past (and I’m sure I’m not alone) is a spreadsheet—maybe Excel or google sheets. And this works well…for a while. I had a row for each Sunday, planned out preaching into the future. One of the features of most spreadsheets is you can have other sheets within the same file, and in those tabs, I recorded books of the Bible or topics which had been preached at church. A spreadsheet is also quite flexible—with the (seemingly) infinite table size, you can leave notes to your future self about ideas and plans.

Pages templates now syncs through iCloud

I use Apple Pages as my main word processing tool. It’s what I use for writing sermons, letters, reports, agenda’s…any document where I’m the only person writing (for team-authoring, it’s Google Docs or Zoho Writer all the way).

Automatically Login to Windows 10 or MacOS

In many churches I’ve been involved with, the computer used for projecting song lyrics has no need to be secured by a password. This is because the computer doesn’t have any sensitive information on it—just song lyrics and slides. Since a number of people use these computers, signing in with a password is an inconvenience, and often the password ends up written on a sticky-note somewhere anyway!

Unite for Elvanto

On this week’s episode of Mac Power Users, the guest, Michael Hyatt, mentioned Fluid as a way of separating work ‘web apps’ from your normal browser.

Fluid creates what’s called a site-specific browser. As the name suggests, it’s web browser dedicated for use on a specific, single site. Why would you want to do this? It’s not to solve a technical problem, but a behavioural one. When using a multi-purpose browser, websites can get visually lost in a sea of similar looking tabs or browser windows, but with an SSB websites live in their own window, with an icon in the ⌘-Tab switcher. Another reason is that having work web sites sitting beside Amazon or Twitter too often leads to distraction.

macOS Take 5

A quick review of 5 Mac Apps I use, mainly which help deal with text.

1. aText
2. Copy’em Paste
3. PopClip
4. Accordance Services
5. Bartender

aText

In ministry, there’s lots of writing: emails, letters, sermons, orders of service, blog posts, social media updates. Often there are words or phrases written over and over again. This is where aText comes into play. aText is a menu bar app which turns snippets of text into longer words or phrases to make writing more efficient.

Two apps for printing

Here are two applications I regularly use to help with printing

Booklet

At church, we often print booklets: for Bible studies, new members’ morning teas, handouts for weddings or funerals. How can easily create a booklet?

Ministry Dashboards

Over the last month or so I’ve been hearing lots about Ministry Dashboards. Basically, Ministry Dashboards are about how a church measures and tracks the health of their church.

Improved Hebrew in iWork

This morning Apple gave a little present to Biblical languages nerds with their updates to the iWork suite of apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) on both Mac and iOS.

Hidden right down the bottom of the release notes was this little gem

Gitbook for Church Documentation

A few months ago I had an idea of using Evernote to write and distribute things like Job Descriptions for things which happen around church (see this post). However, due to Evernote’s pricing, I’m looking into other tools which can do the same sorts of tasks.