Homily Builder is a sermon creation tool that lets you build a homily manuscript, a slide presentation, handouts, and discussion questions simultaneously. Focus on your homily content and build out everything you need for your services at the same time.
Note: Homily Builder works closely with Homily Manager, though they are not the same. Homily Manager organizes all your homily documents while Homily Builder creates specific homilies.
Note: Available in Verbum Pro subscriptions and higher, as well as in the former Silver Feature Set and above.
If you have a specific question about a feature in the Homily Builder, skip ahead to the relevant section. If you're brand new to the Homily Builder, we recommend scanning the whole article to familiarize yourself with all the features included in this tool.
Skip ahead to:
Open the Homily Builder
Create a New Homily Document
There are a few ways to open a new homily document in the Homily Builder:
- Click the Write a Homily button in the Get Started Wizard. In addition to creating a new blank homily document like the other methods, this will open a layout with some of the key resources you need to start researching and writing your homily.
- Open a new homily document from the Documents Menu.
- Open the
Homily Builder from the
Tools Menu.
- Open a new homily document from the Homily Manager.
Open an Existing Homily Document
You can also open an existing homily document by:
- Filtering or searching for your homily document in the Documents Menu.
- Filtering or searching for your homily document in the Homily Manager.
Navigate the Homily Builder
The Homily Builder is a feature-rich tool that houses everything you need to build your homily, from shortcuts for adding content to adjusters for fine-tuning your presentation. Knowing what features are available and where they are located will help you be able to build your homily efficiently. The various features are organized into the Document Toolbar and the Formatting Toolbar.
Document Toolbar
The left-hand side of the Document Toolbar contains five tabs that allow you to choose how your content is displayed, as well as access to the Sidebar Menu.
Sidebar
Clicking the Sidebar Menu icon in the Document Toolbar opens a panel with your homily outline.
Edit
Most of your time will be spent in the Edit tab. In this mode, you can build your homily outline, add content from a variety of sources, and make changes to automatically-generated slides.
Homily Content
Start writing your homily by creating your outline, using the dropdown menu in the Formatting Toolbar to choose text types (Headings 1, 2, 3, Normal, Illustration, etc.). While building your manuscript, you can generate slides, a handout, and a question document simultaneously (these functions are described in detail later in this article).
Add biblical passages to your homily by typing out the reference and pressing Alt+Enter (Windows) or Cmd+Enter (Mac). Verbum will add the passage block in your Top Bible translation and create a slide with the passage preloaded on it. You can also add the reference in-line without a slide by pressing the Tab key after your reference. To create a line break, press Enter.
Opening the passage block's More Actions Menu allows you to adjust how the passage appears on your slides. Choose between Block Paragraphs (displays one paragraph per slide), One Verse Per Slide, or Fully Formatted (divides passage evenly among multiple slides), as well as whether verse numbers and red letters show. You can also click the version abbreviation next to the reference to change which version the passage appears in. Verbum will default to your chosen formatting options next time you create a passage block.
Note: The Homily Builder has fewer passage block formatting options than the Copy Bible Verses tool.
Learn more about adding homily content from various sources in these sections of this article:
Homily Slides
Verbum automatically generates slides from elements of your outline, but you can edit these slides to appear exactly how you want them.
To change the styling or the wording for any generated slide, click or right-click the slide and choose Edit.
To change the text displayed on the slide, make changes in the panels at the top and on the left and view your changes live on the slide itself.
Note: The top panel will only appear once you have selected some text to edit.
Note: You can add animations and other presentation features after exporting your homily to presentation software like Proclaim or Powerpoint.
To change the styling of your slide, click Find Media and filter and search to locate an appropriate background. Select it and choose Update Media.
Depending on the homily block you select to edit, Verbum media will prefilter the available slide types to match your content. Generally speaking, to enable automated slide creation, do not change this prefiltered slide type.
Did you know? You can apply your background Style to all slides in your homily by right-clicking the altered slide and choosing Apply this Style to all slides. You cannot currently apply a custom background to all slides, and some backgrounds do not allow this action.
For user-created media or to use a slide type that doesn’t work with your current homily block type, you can manually create slides.
To add a new background image:
- Copy and paste the background image into your Homily.
- Right click, Edit.
- Add your header as “body text,” and adjust font face, size, and color as desired.
- Click Update Media.
To reuse your custom image on another slide:
- On any existing slide, right click, Edit.
- Click Find Media.
- Change “in Verbum Media” to “User Media.”
- Select your image.
- Add text and click Update Media as above.
Text
Display a text-only view of your homily.
Slides
Show all of the slides in your homily document.
Handout
View your handout. To select which text appears in the handout, navigate to the Edit tab, highlight your desired text, and select the Handout button in the Formatting Toolbar. To create blanks for your listeners to fill in, highlight your desired text (also in the Edit tab) and select "Fill-in" in the menu that appears. Back in the Handout tab, you can choose whether the answers are shown or hidden. You can print this document from the Export menu.
Questions
View your questions document. To create questions for this document, ensure your are in the Edit tab and type a question or insert generated questions from the Homily Assistant. Highlight the question and select the Questions button in the Formatting Toolbar. You can print this document from the Export menu.
The rest of the major features of Homily Builder are located in the right-hand side of Document Toolbar.
Homily Assistant
Click the Homily Assistant icon (also accessible in the Info panel) for help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?
Share
Click the Share button to make your homily document public or share it with a Faithlife group.
Preach
Click the Preach icon to enter preaching mode. This opens your homily in a web browser and includes a text-only view of your homily, the current time, a timer, an optional slide view, and local formatting options to make delivering your homily easy and distraction-free.
Export
Click the Export button to view Export options:
- Send to Proclaim
- Post to Logos Sermons
- Export to PowerPoint
- Print/Export
The Print icon is a shortcut to printing, copying, or saving your homily document to your device.
Info Panel
Clicking the Info icon opens the Info Panel, which contains five tabs:
Homily Info
The Homily Info tab holds important details about your homily. The more metadata you add, the easier it will be for you to find at a later date. If you publish your homilies using Logos Sermons, this metadata will help others discover your homily and know what it’s about.
Many of the input fields are preloaded with consistent naming conventions, like the topics and reference fields. This helps you stay consistent and avoid duplicate tags.
- Series: Provide a series title to add the homily to a series. Matching existing series show below as you type.
- Number: Shows where this particular homily appears in a series
- Topics: Begin typing to show predefined biblical topics and themes. Select one from the list to add it to your homily details. You can add multiple topics.
- Passages: Add a biblical passage by typing and choosing the passage from the list below. You can add multiple passages.
- Tags: Provides the ability to add your own tags to your homilies
- Description: Provide a couple of sentences describing the homily's content.
- Target Duration: An indication of how long the homily is intended to be
- Private Note: Unlike the other homily metadata, your private notes will not publish to Logos Sermons, but are visible to you when viewing the homily in Verbum.
- Links: Links to external URLs you might want to reference
- Speaker: By default, your name shows for any homily you create. To change the speaker, provide a new name in the input field.
- Occasion: Add a date, venue (like a specific church or conference), and time (e.g., 10:00am Service).
- Audience: Provide audience segments like General Adult, Kids, Youth Group, Conference, or Other.
- Liturgy: Where applicable, add a liturgical day, season, and year.
Note: To create a template for use in the Homily Manager, select Template at the top of the Homily Info pane. Learn more about the Homily Manager.
Homily Notebook
From the Homily Notebook tab, you can add notes into your homily document.
- To create a note, click New note to open the notes tool and add a personal note to your homily. A notebook with the same name as your homily will be created automatically.
- To add note content directly to your homily from a previously-created note, open a notebook to view its notes. The note must be located in a named notebook.
- Click the insert icon
to insert content from your selected note into the homily document. Click the edit icon
to open the note for editing.
- Learn more about the Notes tool in Verbum.
Version History
Find a previously saved version of your homily in the Version History tab. Select a version from the list to revert to that previously saved version.
Popular Quotes
Use the Popular Quotes tab to find quotes related to your homily or passage. Enter your topic or passage. Verbum will pull together all the related quotes for you to choose from. Drag the quote you want into your manuscript. Homily Builder will bring it in as a block quote and make a dynamic slide.
Homily Assistant
The Homily Assistant tab (also accessible in the Document Toolbar) provides help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?
More Actions Menu
In the More Actions Menu, you can find options for adjusting how the Homily Builder panel displays on your screen, for sharing your Homily Document, for showing or hiding your slides in the Edit tab, and for access to support resources.
Formatting Toolbar
The formatting toolbar offers a variety of options and works similarly to other word processing software.
-
Format Styles: Choose a text Style from the dropdown menu.
- Normal: Use this Style for the text of your homily. Normal text will not automatically appear in slides, handouts, or questions.
- Heading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5): Verbum will generate slides from each of your headings, as well as include them in your handouts and question documents.
- Blockquote: Set block quotations apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Illustration: Set your illustration apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Prompt: Set prompts apart from the rest of your manuscript text. Prompts will not be included when you Export the transcript of your homily.
- Formatting Styles: Call special attention to any text in your homily manuscript. Click the styling dropdown to add font, color, and background color styling to the selected text. Save any selection as a new Style to use it in the future.
- Text Styling: Style any text with standard formatting options like bold, italics, or underline. You can also create bulleted or numbered lists or change the indentation of any selected text.
- Fill-in: Select any text and choose Fill-in from the formatting toolbar to generate a fill-in-the-blank style for the text in your printable handouts.
Note: The text also needs to be marked with Include in Handout or Include in Questions.
-
Include in Handout
: Include text in the handout document by highlighting it and clicking the Handout button. Text included in the Handout document is indicated by a blue background. Selecting this option does not change the appearance of the text when you Export it. Deselecting this option will remove the text from your Handout.
-
Include in Questions
: Include text in the Question document by highlighting it and clicking the Question button. Text included in the Question document is indicated by a green background. Selecting this option does not change the appearance of the text when you Export it. Deselecting this option will remove the text from your Question document.
-
Add Slides from Selected Text
: Click to create a slide from any selected text in your homily document.
-
Add Slides from Selected References
: If you’ve added a reference within a paragraph, Verbum can generate a Bible slide for that reference if you select the paragraph and click this button.
- Undo/Redo: Undo to remove the last content change or redo to add a removed content change back into your document.
- Clear formatting: Clear styling on any selected text with the clear formatting button.
Additional Resources
For more assistance building your homilies, see the following articles:
Developing Homilies with the Homily Starter Guide
Homily Preparation and Management
Note: Homily Builder provides the ability to create and modify homilies on iPads and Android tablets. Homily Documents can be viewed, but not modified, on mobile phones.
Note: A Verbum Pro or higher subscription is required to use Homily Builder on Android tablets.
Skip ahead to:
Open the Homily Builder
There are a few ways to open a new homily document in the Homily Builder:
-
Open a new Homily Document from the Documents section of the Actions menu
- Open a new Homily Document from the Documents tab
- Open a new Homily Document from the Homily Manager Tool.
Note: To open a previously created homily from the Documents menu, filter or search the Documents menu to locate your desired homily.
Navigate the Homily Builder
The Homily Builder is a feature-rich tool that houses everything you need to build your homily, from shortcuts for adding content to adjusters for fine-tuning your presentation. Knowing what features are available and where they are located will help you be able to build your homily efficiently. The various features are organized into the Document Toolbar and the Formatting Toolbar.
Document Toolbar
The left-hand side of the Document Toolbar contains five tabs that allow you to choose how your content is displayed, as well as access to the Sidebar Menu.
Note: Currently only the Edit and Slides views are available on Android tablets.
Sidebar
Tapping the Sidebar Menu icon in the Document Toolbar opens a panel with your homily outline.
Edit
Most of your time will be spent in the Edit tab. In this mode, you can build your homily outline, add content from a variety of sources, and make changes to automatically-generated slides.
Homily Content
Start writing your homily by creating your outline, using the dropdown menu in the Formatting Toolbar to choose text types (Headings 1, 2, 3, Normal, Illustration, etc.). While building your manuscript, you can generate slides, a handout, and a question document simultaneously (these functions are described in detail later in this article).
Add biblical passages to your homily by typing out the reference and pressing Cmd+Enter. Verbum will add the passage block in your Top Bible translation and create a slide with the passage preloaded on it. You can also add the reference in-line without a slide by pressing the Tab key after your reference. To create a line break, press Enter.
Opening the passage block's More Actions Menu (the icon appears when you hover over the passage block) allows you to adjust how the passage appears on your slides. Choose between Block Paragraphs (displays one paragraph per slide), One Verse Per Slide, or Fully Formatted (divides passage evenly among multiple slides), as well as whether verse numbers and red letters show. You can also click the version abbreviation next to the reference to change which version the passage appears in. Verbum will default to your chosen formatting options next time you create a passage block.
Learn more about adding homily content from various sources in these sections of this article:
Homily Slides
Verbum automatically generates slides from elements of your outline, and you can tap a slide to either delete it or apply its style to other slides.
Note: If you use Proclaim, you can add animations and other presentation features after exporting your homily to it.
Text
Display a text-only view of your homily.
Slides
Show all of the slides in your homily document.
Handout
View your handout. To select which text appears in the handout, navigate to the Edit tab, highlight your desired text, and select the Handout button in the Formatting Toolbar. To create blanks for your listeners to fill in, highlight your desired text (also in the Edit tab) and select "Fill-in" in the menu that appears. Back in the Handout tab, you can choose whether the answers are shown or hidden. You can print this document from the Export menu.
Questions
View your questions document. To create questions for this document, ensure your are in the Edit tab and type a question or insert generated questions from the Homily Assistant. Highlight the question and select the Questions button in the Formatting Toolbar. You can print this document from the Export menu.
The rest of the major features of Homily Builder are located in the right-hand side of the Document Toolbar.
Homily Assistant
Tap the Homily Assistant icon (also accessible in the Info panel) for help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?.
Preach
Tap the Preach icon to enter a preaching mode that includes a text-only view of your homily, the current time, a timer, an optional slide view, and local formatting options to make delivering your homily easy and distraction-free.
Export
Tap the Export button to view Export options:
- Send to Proclaim
- Post to Logos Sermons
Info Panel
Tapping the Info icon opens the Info Panel, which contains three tabs:
Homily Info
The Homily Info tab holds important details about your homily. The more metadata you add, the easier it will be for you to find at a later date. If you publish your homilies using Logos Sermons, this metadata will help others discover your homily and know what it’s about.
Many of the input fields are preloaded with consistent naming conventions, like the topics and reference fields. This helps you stay consistent and avoid duplicate tags.
- Series: Provide a series title to add the homily to a series. Matching existing series show below as you type.
- Number: Shows where this particular homily appears in a series
- Topics: Begin typing to show predefined biblical topics and themes. Select one from the list to add it to your homily details. You can add multiple topics.
- Passages: Add a biblical passage by typing and choosing the passage from the list below. You can add multiple passages.
- Tags: Provides the ability to add your own tags to your homilies
- Description: Provide a couple of sentences describing the homily's content.
- Target Duration: An indication of how long the homily is intended to be
- Private Note: Unlike the other homily metadata, your private notes will not publish to Logos Sermons, but are visible to you when viewing the homily in Verbum.
- Links: Links to external URLs you might want to reference
- Speaker: By default, your name shows for any homilies you create. To change the speaker, provide a new name in the input field.
- Occasion: Add a date, venue (like a specific church or conference), and time (e.g., 10:00am Service).
- Audience: Provide audience segments like General Adult, Kids, Youth Group, Conference, or Other.
- Liturgy: Where applicable, add a liturgical day, season, and year.
Note: To create a template for use in the Homily Manager, select Template at the top of the Homily Info pane. Learn more about the Homily Manager.
Popular Quotes
Use the Popular Quotes tab to find quotes related to your homily or passage. Enter your topic or passage. Verbum will pull together all the related quotes for you to choose from. Tap Add to homily or drag the quote you want into your manuscript. Homily Builder will bring it in as a block quote and make a dynamic slide.
Homily Assistant
The Homily Assistant tab (also accessible in the Document Toolbar) provides help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?.
More Actions Menu
In the More Actions Menu, you can find options for adjusting how the Homily Builder panel displays on your screen or for showing or hiding your slides in the Edit tab. Selecting the show / hide options changes the text that appears in the menu.
Formatting Toolbar
The formatting toolbar offers a variety of options and works similarly to other word processing software.
-
Format Styles: Choose a text Style from the dropdown menu.
- Normal: Use this Style for the text of your homily. Normal text will not automatically appear in slides, handouts, or questions.
- Heading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5): Verbum will generate slides from each of your headings, as well as include them in your handouts and question documents.
- Blockquote: Set block quotations apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Illustration: Set your illustration apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Prompt: Set prompts apart from the rest of your manuscript text. Prompts will not be included when you Export the transcript of your homily.
- Formatting Styles: Call special attention to any text in your homily manuscript. Click the styling dropdown to add font, color, and background color styling to the selected text. Save any selection as a new Style to use it in the future.
- Text Styling: Style any text with standard formatting options like bold, italics, or underline. You can also create bulleted or numbered lists or change the indentation of any selected text.
- Fill-in: Select any text and choose Fill-in from the formatting toolbar to generate a fill-in-the-blank style for the text in your printable handouts.
Note: The text also needs to be marked with Include in Handout or Include in Questions.
-
Include in Handout
-
Include in Questions
-
Add Slides from Selected Text
-
Add Slides from Selected References
- Undo/Redo: Undo to remove the last content change or redo to add a removed content change back into your document.
- Clear formatting: Clear styling on any selected text with the clear formatting button.
Additional Resources
For more assistance building your homilies, see the articles in this series:
Homily Preparation and Management
Skip ahead to:
Open the Homily Builder
Create a New Homily Document
There are a few ways to open a new homily document in the Homily Builder:
- Click the Write a Homily button in the Get Started Wizard. In addition to creating a new blank homily document like the other methods, this will open a layout with some of the key resources you need to start researching and writing your homily.
- Open a new homily document from the Documents Menu.
- Open the
- Open a new homily document from the Homily Manager.
Open an Existing Homily Document
You can also open an existing homily document by:
- Filtering or searching for your homily document in the Documents Menu.
- Filtering or searching for your homily document in the Homily Manager.
Navigate the Homily Builder
The Homily Builder is a feature-rich tool that houses everything you need to build your homily, from shortcuts for adding content to adjusters for fine-tuning your presentation. Knowing what features are available and where they are located will help you be able to build your homily efficiently. The various features are organized into the Document Toolbar and the Formatting Toolbar.
Document Toolbar
The left-hand side of the Document Toolbar contains five tabs that allow you to choose how your content is displayed, as well as access to the Sidebar Menu.
Sidebar
Clicking the Sidebar Menu icon in the Document Toolbar opens a panel with your homily outline.
Edit
Most of your time will be spent in the Edit tab. In this mode, you can build your homily outline, add content from a variety of sources, and make changes to automatically-generated slides.
Homily Content
Start writing your homily by creating your outline, using the dropdown menu in the Formatting Toolbar to choose text types (Headings 1, 2, 3, Normal, Illustration, etc.). While building your manuscript, you can generate slides, a handout, and a question document simultaneously (these functions are described in detail later in this article).
Add biblical passages to your homily by typing out the reference and pressing Alt+Enter (Windows) or Cmd+Enter (Mac). Verbum will add the passage block in your Top Bible translation and create a slide with the passage preloaded on it. You can also add the reference in-line without a slide by pressing the Tab key after your reference. To create a line break, press Enter.
Opening the passage block's More Actions Menu allows you to adjust how the passage appears on your slides. Choose between Block Paragraphs (displays one paragraph per slide), One Verse Per Slide, or Fully Formatted (divides passage evenly among multiple slides), as well as whether verse numbers and red letters show. You can also click the version abbreviation next to the reference to change which version the passage appears in. Verbum will default to your chosen formatting options next time you create a passage block.
Note: The Homily Builder has fewer passage block formatting options than the Copy Bible Verses tool.
Learn more about adding homily content from various sources in these sections of this article:
Homily Slides
Verbum automatically generates slides from elements of your outline, but you can edit these slides to appear exactly how you want them.
To change the styling or the wording for any generated slide, click or right-click the slide and choose Edit.
To change the text displayed on the slide, make changes in the panels at the top and on the left and view your changes live on the slide itself.
Note: The top panel will only appear once you have selected some text to edit.
Note: You can add animations and other presentation features after exporting your homily to presentation software like Proclaim or Powerpoint.
To change the styling of your slide, click Find Media and filter and search to locate an appropriate background. Select it and choose Update Media.
Depending on the homily block you select to edit, Verbum media will prefilter the available slide types to match your content. Generally speaking, to enable automated slide creation, do not change this prefiltered slide type.
Did you know? You can apply your background Style to all slides in your homily by right-clicking the altered slide and choosing Apply this Style to all slides. You cannot currently apply a custom background to all slides, and some backgrounds do not allow this action.
For user-created media or to use a slide type that doesn’t work with your current homily block type, you can manually create slides.
To add a new background image:
- Copy and paste the background image into your Homily.
- Right click, Edit.
- Add your header as “body text,” and adjust font face, size, and color as desired.
- Click Update Media.
To reuse your custom image on another slide:
- On any existing slide, right click, Edit.
- Click Find Media.
- Change “in Verbum Media” to “User Media.”
- Select your image.
- Add text and click Update Media as above.
Text
Display a text-only view of your homily.
Slides
Show all of the slides in your homily document.
Handout
View your handout. To select which text appears in the handout, navigate to the Edit tab, highlight your desired text, and select the Handout button in the Formatting Toolbar. To create blanks for your listeners to fill in, highlight your desired text (also in the Edit tab) and select "Fill-in" in the menu that appears. Back in the Handout tab, you can choose whether the answers are shown or hidden. You can print this document from the Export menu.
Questions
View your questions document. To create questions for this document, ensure your are in the Edit tab and type a question or insert generated questions from the Homily Assistant. Highlight the question and select the Questions button in the Formatting Toolbar. You can print this document from the Export menu.
The rest of the major features of Homily Builder are located in the right-hand side of the Document Toolbar.
Homily Assistant
Click the Homily Assistant icon (also accessible in the Info panel) for help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?.
Share
Click the Share button to make your homily document public or share it with a Faithlife group.
Preach
Click the Preach icon to enter a preaching mode that includes a text-only view of your homily, the current time, a timer, an optional slide view, and local formatting options to make delivering your homily easy and distraction-free.
Export
Click the Export button to view Export options:
- Send to Proclaim
- Post to Logos Sermons
- Export to PowerPoint
- Print/Export
The Print icon is a shortcut to printing, copying, or saving your homily document to your device.
Info Panel
Clicking the Info icon opens the Info Panel, which contains five tabs:
Homily Info
The Homily Info tab holds important details about your homily. The more metadata you add, the easier it will be for you to find at a later date. If you publish your homily using Logos Sermons, this metadata will help others discover your homily and know what it’s about.
Many of the input fields are preloaded with consistent naming conventions, like the topics and reference fields. This helps you stay consistent and avoid duplicate tags.
- Series: Provide a series title to add the homily to a series. Matching existing series show below as you type.
- Number: Shows where this particular homily appears in a series
- Topics: Begin typing to show predefined biblical topics and themes. Select one from the list to add it to your homily details. You can add multiple topics.
- Passages: Add a biblical passage by typing and choosing the passage from the list below. You can add multiple passages.
- Tags: Provides the ability to add your own tags to your homilies
- Description: Provide a couple of sentences describing the homily's content.
- Target Duration: An indication of how long the homily is intended to be
- Private Note: Unlike the other homily metadata, your private notes will not publish to Logos Sermons, but are visible to you when viewing the homily in Verbum.
- Links: Links to external URLs you might want to reference
- Speaker: By default, your name shows for any homilies you create. To change the speaker, provide a new name in the input field.
- Occasion: Add a date, venue (like a specific church or conference), and time (e.g., 10:00am Service).
- Audience: Provide audience segments like General Adult, Kids, Youth Group, Conference, or Other.
- Liturgy: Where applicable, add a liturgical day, season, and year.
Note: To create a template for use in the Homily Manager, select Template at the top of the Homily Info pane. Learn more about the Homily Manager.
Homily Notebook
From the Homily Notebook tab, you can add notes into your homily document.
- To create a note, click New note to open the notes tool and add a personal note to your homily. A notebook with the same name as your homily will be created automatically.
- To add note content directly to your homily from a previously-created note, open a notebook to view its notes. The note must be located in a named notebook.
- Click the insert icon
- Learn more about the Notes tool in Verbum.
Version History
Find a previously saved version of your homily in the Version History tab. Select a version from the list to revert to that previously saved version.
Popular Quotes
Use the Popular Quotes tab to find quotes related to your homily or passage. Enter your topic or passage. Verbum will pull together all the related quotes for you to choose from. Drag the quote you want into your manuscript. Homily Builder will bring it in as a block quote and make a dynamic slide.
Homily Assistant
The Homily Assistant tab (also accessible in the Document Toolbar) provides help in generating outlines, illustrations, questions or applications for your homily. For more details, see What Can I Do with Homily Assistant?.
More Actions Menu
In the More Actions Menu, you can find options for adjusting how the Homily Builder panel displays on your screen, for sharing your Homily Document, for showing or hiding your slides in the Edit tab, and for access to support resources.
Formatting Toolbar
The formatting toolbar offers a variety of options and works similarly to other word processing software.
-
Format Styles: Choose a text Style from the dropdown menu.
- Normal: Use this Style for the text of your homily. Normal text will not automatically appear in slides, handouts, or questions.
- Heading (1, 2, 3, 4, 5): Verbum will generate slides from each of your headings, as well as include them in your handouts and question documents.
- Blockquote: Set block quotations apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Illustration: Set your illustration apart from the rest of your manuscript text.
- Prompt: Set prompts apart from the rest of your manuscript text. Prompts will not be included when you Export the transcript of your homily.
- Formatting Styles: Call special attention to any text in your homily manuscript. Click the styling dropdown to add font, color, and background color styling to the selected text. Save any selection as a new Style to use it in the future.
- Text Styling: Style any text with standard formatting options like bold, italics, or underline. You can also create bulleted or numbered lists or change the indentation of any selected text.
- Fill-in: Select any text and choose Fill-in from the formatting toolbar to generate a fill-in-the-blank style for the text in your printable handouts.
Note: The text also needs to be marked with Include in Handout or Include in Questions.
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Include in Handout
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Include in Questions
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Add Slides from Selected Text
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Add Slides from Selected References
- Undo/Redo: Undo to remove the last content change or redo to add a removed content change back into your document.
- Clear formatting: Clear styling on any selected text with the clear formatting button.
Additional Resources
For more assistance building your homilies, see the following articles:
Developing Homilies with the Homily Starter Guide
Homily Preparation and Management