Hi David,

I'm actually currently transitioning my church over from EasyWorship to OpenLP at the moment, and many of my users have said that OLP does seem easier to use from that point of view (I've set it up so all the operator needs to do under normal circumstances is press the down arrow to cycle through the service).

Searching in a service is really easy, the search will search for a title or a phrase within the song and searches automatically after (I think) 3 letters are typed in (or on 'Enter'), then it's just a case of double-clicking the result to send it straight to live. It's also possible to use the Android or iOS remote apps to control it including adding in songs (I confused the person running our AV one morning by adding a song remotely...!).

There are some other advantages over OpenLP that I've found - I really hate the fact that EW changes the font size depending on the contents of a song, meaning that short songs appear massive on the screen but hymns will show up tiny. OLP doesn't, it's a fixed size no matter what. That said, it's also customisable but a little bit of CSS and HTML knowledge helps in that.

Bible passages are so much easier as you don't need to edit each one as it goes up to split it between slides as it will just work according to the theme. It also works much better with video clips, even out-of-the-box - I would recommend using VLC from within OLP, but some videos that didn't work for me in EW worked fine on the vanilla OLP media player.

The only thing that I've found that EW does better than OLP is screen transitions (eg, fading in and out), but knowing how OLP does things behind the scenes, I know why this isn't the case, and it's just something the congregation at my church will have to get used to not having!