Your slides are finally composed inside Sanctumel
There was a gap, and it showed every week.
Sanctumel could project song lyrics, a verse, a quotation, a countdown, a short announcement. Thirteen slide types, each designed for what it carries. But a retreat announcement with its photo, a board agenda with its timings, a baptism poster with the candidates' names fitted none of them. So the church left Sanctumel, composed elsewhere, and came back with a file to be opened separately on Sunday morning.
The Slide Studio fills that gap. And how it fills it matters as much as the fact that it does.
It is not a second projection system
That was the most important decision, and it was taken before the first line of code. A slide composed in the Studio is a fourteenth slide type, not a parallel universe.
The consequence is immediate and free: the hall screen, the stage return, the QR remote, the direct link between screens on the same network, projection without internet, the session lock and crash recovery all apply without a single extra line. You relearn nothing. The "Project" button opens the desk you already use.
A deck can even mix: three compositions, then a real countdown, then a song's lyrics. A pre-service loop is built in one piece.
You never start on a blank page
That is the second decision, and it comes from a simple observation. Whoever prepares the announcements on Saturday evening is a volunteer, often alone, and nobody will train them. Faced with an empty frame, they go back to the tool they already know.
So the Studio opens on eighteen starting points, in three families. Half of them do not speak of church, and that is deliberate: agenda, minutes, quarterly goals, figures and review, roadmap, team presentation. A department meeting does not need a sanctuary background.
A template is not a saved slide: it is a set of layouts. The cover does not look like the inner pages, and "Add a slide" offers your template's layouts before the generic ones. You do not redo the formatting on every page.
Your church saves its own in one click, for everyone. And we add more over time: a template is data, not an application version, so it appears for you without an update and without touching the decks you already made.
Everything is placed by hand
People are used to drag and drop. You grab a block and put it down. Guides appear when an edge lines up, and the block snaps to them on its own. Arrow keys nudge by half a percent, Shift + arrow by five.
There is no coordinate field to fill in. That was a design choice, not an oversight: asking a volunteer for "X: 12.5%" loses them by the third slide.
Your colours, and they stay yours
The picker offers your church's colours first: background, ink, accent, gold. They are not copied into the slide - they are written into it as roles. The day your church changes its palette, all your decks follow.
At each choice, Sanctumel works out legibility against the real background and says so plainly. A colour that works on a laptop can be unreadable from the back row, and when it does not work, one button places the colour that fixes it.
Your years of files are not lost
A church arriving on the Suite already has dozens of presentations. "Start over" is the one sentence that makes it leave.
So a PowerPoint comes in with its editable text - position, size, alignment, bold, bulleted lists - and immediately takes your church's colours rather than the source file's. A PDF comes in pixel-faithful, fonts and effects included, for the leaflets you did not lay out yourself.
The other way, four outputs for four different gestures: PowerPoint to send to someone without Sanctumel; PDF to print and archive; images to post in the church group; and the .sml format to send to another church on the Suite. That last one is the only format that knows an element is a verse, a song or a sermon paragraph - and the only one that keeps your colours as roles, so the deck that arrives redresses itself in the receiving church's colours.
Every export says what did not carry over. Staying silent about it would mean letting someone find out in front of the congregation.
And what the church already owns comes in without retyping
The Bible, your song books and the sermon library are already in the Suite. A verse, a song section, a Message paragraph are chosen and arrive with their reference.
A verse or paragraph that is too long does not become shrunken text nobody can read from the back: it becomes several slides, cut at sentence ends, each keeping its marker. That is the difference between a tool that helps you and a tool that leaves you to cope.
What it is not
It is not a drawing program, nor a spreadsheet, nor a rival to the big presentation tools. It is the tool a church needs on Saturday evening, held by someone nobody will train, for a screen three hundred people will look at the next day.
That is why the screen tells you plainly that composing does not happen on a phone: placing a block to within five millimetres on a six-centimetre screen is not work you can ask of anyone. The library, reviewing and starting the projection do work everywhere.