Disappear across the top of the Ribbon and contain groups of related commands

Finding this article in your Sibelius Reference

This guide is reproduced from the Working with the Ribbon chapter on page 11 of the Sibelius reference. The Sibelius reference is available from the following:

• Within Sibelius by clicking File > Help > Sibelius 7 Reference.
• As a PDF download from www.sibelius.com/download/documentation
• As a printed hard copy from the Avid Store

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Sibelius window
3. The ribbon tabs
4. Groups and controls
5. Keyboard access
6. Screen tips
7. Launching related dialogs
8. Saving your working environment
9. Notes for upgraders

Introduction

The ribbon is the wide band of command buttons that appears at the top of the Sibelius window, housing all of the features of the program, organized according to task. In addition to the ribbon, every Sibelius document window also contains other useful controls.

Click here to watch the Sibelius 7 guided tour

The Sibelius window

The picture below shows a typical Sibelius window, so you can see where the ribbon is, and several other useful controls at the top and bottom of the window:

Here’s a quick guided tour to the Sibelius window, starting at the top and working our way down:

• Quick Access Toolbar (Windows only): this has three important buttons: Save, Undo and Redo. The Undo and Redo buttons also have menus attached to them, allowing you to quickly undo or redo to any point since you opened the score. (On Mac, these options are found in the File and Edit menus respectively.)
• Title bar: this shows the filename of the document, and the name of the current dynamic part or version being viewed (if applicable). On Windows, you will see an asterisk (*) after the filename if the score has unsaved changes. (On Mac, you will instead see a black dot inside the red close button at the top left-hand corner of the window.)
• Window buttons: The title bar contains a set of buttons for working with the current window. On Windows, these buttons appear at the top right-hand corner, while on Mac, they appear at the top left-hand corner.
• Minimize is the first of the three buttons on Windows, and the middle of the three on Mac. Click this to make your score window disappear from the screen without closing the file.
• Restore down/Maximize (called Zoom on Mac) is the second of the three buttons on Windows, and is the third of the three buttons on Mac. This button resizes the document window. Clicking this button toggles your window between maximum size or its previous size.
• Close is the third of the three buttons on Windows, and the first on the Mac. As the name suggests, clicking this button closes the current window.
• Find box: type one or more keywords into this box to see a list of suggested controls on any of the ribbon tabs; very useful for finding something if you can’t remember exactly where it is. As you type, Sibelius shows a list of matching controls: use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to choose the one you need, then hit Return to be taken there. Sibelius helpfully highlights the control for you.
• Minimize Ribbon: the ribbon (described below) takes up a reasonable amount of vertical space. If you want to see more of your score as you work on it, click the Minimize Ribbon button. When you do, the ribbon disappears, leaving only the ribbon tabs across the top of the screen. To make the ribbon reappear, click the button again to make the ribbon reappear permanently, or simply click whichever tab you want to use to make the ribbon reappear until you have finished making a choice from it, at which point it disappears again.
• Help: click the ? button to open this Reference Guide in its on-screen form. You can find further help in the File tab of the ribbon.
• The ribbon: discussed in more detail below.
• Document tabs: you can open multiple different views of the same document – e.g. a full score and individual instruments’ parts – inside a single window, and switch between them using these tabs. When you start a new score, only one tab will be shown, labeled Full Score. You can open new tabs using the + button at the right-hand side of the document tab bar, or through other options that switch the view (e.g. hitting W switches between the full score and the dynamic part corresponding to the current selection).
• Open new tab: this + button shows a menu that allows you to open a new tab containing a different view from the current score, including dynamic parts and saved versions. You can also choose New Window, which opens the current tab in a new window. You don’t have to click the button itself to open the menu: simply right-click anywhere along the document tab bar to do the same thing.
• Switch tabs: if you have many tabs open at once, you may not be able to see all of the names of the tabs clearly across the width of the tab bar. Click this button to show a menu listing all of the open tabs in the current window, allowing you to quickly switch to any of them.
• Status bar: the status bar runs along the bottom of the window, which gives you information about the current document and has some useful buttons for quick access.
• Information read-outs: at the left-hand of the status bar is a series of useful read-outs. From left to right: the current page and the total number of pages; the total number of bars; the instrument on which the current selection resides, if there is one; the range of the current selection, if there is one; the timecode of the current selection; the pitches of the selected notes (or the first note or chord of a passage if you have a range of music selected); the harmony of the chord made up by all of the selected notes at the start of the selection, displayed as a chord symbol; a description of the current operation (e.g. Edit Passage or Edit Text); whether or not the current view is currently displayed at concert (sounding) pitch or transposing (written) pitch; whether Layout > Hiding Staves > Focus on Staves is switched on; whether or not Magnetic Layout is enabled or disabled for the selected objects; and/or the font and point size of the selected text object.
• Zoom controls: at the right-hand end of the status bar is a slider with – and + buttons at either end that allow you to change the zoom level of the current view quickly and easily. To the left of the slider is a read-out of the current zoom level, expressed as a percentage.
• Document view buttons: to the left of the zoom controls is a set of buttons that allow you to switch between different types of view quickly, for example between showing the pages of your score laid out horizontally and Panorama view. These buttons are also found on the View tab of the ribbon.

The ribbon tabs

The ribbon itself is split into 11 tabs. The first tab, File, is unlike the other tabs: clicking it hides the score altogether and instead shows you a special view called Backstage, which contains everything you might want to do with a file (as opposed to what you might do to a file, which is what the other 10 tabs are for). From the File tab you can create, open, save and close files, import and export them in different formats, print music out, access special learning and teaching features, get detailed help, and more. (The first chapter of the Sibelius Reference is devoted to the operations you can perform from the File tab.)

The other 10 tabs are ordered roughly according to the order in which you typically perform tasks while working on a score, so as you make your way from the start of a project towards its end, you will typically work your way through most of the tabs of the ribbon from left to right. (The Sibelius Reference is likewise ordered according to the order of the tabs.)

These 10 tabs contain the following kinds of commands:

• Home: basic score setup, like adding or removing instruments and bars, plus key editing operations, including clipboard operations and Sibelius’s powerful filters.
• Note Input: commands relating to alphabetic, step-time and Flexi-time input, plus note editing operations, compositional tools such as explode/reduce, and transformations such as retrograde, inversion, and so on.
• Notations: all of the basic markings other than notes, rests and text, including clefs, key and time signatures, special barlines, lines, symbols, notehead types, etc.
• Text: font style and size controls, choice of text styles, plus lyrics, chord symbols, rehearsal marks, and bar and page numbering options.
• Play: choice of playback configuration, mixer, transport (playback) controls, Live Tempo, Live Playback, options for how Sibelius should interpret your score during playback, and features for writing music to video.
• Layout: document setup options such as page and staff size, staff spacing, hiding staves, Magnetic Layout options, plus formatting controls.
• Appearance: options that affect the visual appearance of your score, including choice of house style, note spacing and instrument name format, plus commands to reset or change the design or position of the objects in your score.
• Parts: options relating to instrumental parts.
• Review: add and review sticky note comments, create and manage multiple versions of the same score, compare revisions, and access various proof-reading plug-ins.
• View: change the layout and size of the music on the screen, shor or hide various “invisibles” and other helpful markings that provide useful information about your score, hide or show extra panels for advanced operation, and arrange or switch between the open document windows.

Groups and controls

Each ribbon tab contains a number of groups, which organize related commands together. The name of each group is shown below the names of the individual commands in gray text, and groups are separated from each other by a vertical line:

The picture above shows the Common, Lines and Symbols groups from the Notations tab. Each group contains one or more controls of various types, including buttons, buttons that open menus, split buttons (where half the button is a regular button and the other half opens a menu), checkboxes, combo boxes and galleries, which are menus with special features. Galleries come in two flavors:

• Drop-down galleries: these may look a lot like normal menus, displaying their contents as text, or they may display their contents graphically. Unlike regular menus, galleries typically list options organized by category, which can then be filtered (see below). An example of a textual gallery is Home > Select > Filters. All of the buttons in the Notations > Common group shown in the picture above use drop-down graphical galleries.
• In-ribbon galleries: these galleries are embedded directly in the ribbon, allowing you to see the first few items in the gallery without opening it. In-ribbon galleries allow you to scroll up and down the list using the scroll arrow buttons at the right-hand end, or to open the gallery, making it appear like a drop-down gallery. Notations > Lines and Notations > Symbols both contain in-ribbon galleries, shown in the picture above. Many galleries in Sibelius contain category filters, which allow you to show only one kind of thing at a time in a gallery. Category filters are found at the very top of an open gallery; by default, there is no filter (so the filter reads All), but you can click the filter name to show a menu in which all the categories are listed. Choose one category and all of the other categories are filtered out.

Depending on the width of the window, the ribbon will do its best to display as many as possible of the controls in all of the groups on the current tab. Some controls may be stacked vertically to save space, or perhaps even hide their textual description. If space gets very tight, some groups may end up collapsed, which means that instead of showing each of its controls directly on the ribbon, all of the controls are collapsed behind a single button, which shows the whole contents of the group below the ribbon when clicked, like this:

In the picture above, several of the groups on the Layout tab are collapsed, and the Staff Spacing group has been opened by clicking the button that represents the collapsed group. Sibelius has so many commands that in order to ensure every group on every tab is not shown collapsed, your screen display has to be at least 1920 pixels wide!

Keyboard access

The ribbon includes a number of time-saving features to help you to learn and get around the program quickly, chief among them the ability to access every command via the keyboard using key tips. Key tips are special shortcuts that take you straight to a command, whichever ribbon tab it is on.

To show key tips, simply hit Alt (Windows) or Ctrl (Mac): you don’t need to hold the key down. A small overlay appears below each tab’s name:

To access a tab, simply type the key tip shown for that tab. For example, type L to switch to the Layout tab:

Now type the key tip shown (usually two letters) for the command you want to use.

Once you have set the focus into the ribbon by hitting Alt (Windows) or Ctrl (Mac), you can also navigate around the tabs and the controls in each tab using the arrow keys or Tab and Shift + Tab, then use either Space, Return or Enter to activate the button or other control that is currently in focus.

Screen tips

Every command in the ribbon also has an extended text description, which appears if you hover your mouse over it for a moment. These descriptions are called screen tips, and they provide useful additional context on each command. On the right, you can see the screen tip for Home > Clipboard > Select Graphic. Notice how a keyboard shortcut is shown in parentheses after the name of the command. Unlike key tips, which can only be used in sequence after hitting Alt (Windows) or Ctrl (Mac), this kind of keyboard shortcut can be used from anywhere, and furthermore you can customize them if you want to.

Launching related dialogs

Some groups in the ribbon have a small extra button in the bottom right-hand corner called a dialog launcher button, which when clicked, you will be surprised to learn, launches a dialog containing further options relating to the commands in that group.

In the picture above, the mouse pointer is over the dialog launcher button in Layout > Document Setup, which launches the Document Setup dialog, in which you can change the page size, orientation and margins with additional options over and above those on the ribbon.

Saving your working environment

Sibelius automatically keeps track of the arrangement of windows and tabs while you are working on your score, so that it can restore them the next time you open it. When you re-open a score you have worked on before, Sibelius will:

• Open the document window to the same size and position you had used when you last closed it
• Open all the tabs that were open when you last closed it, and bring the last-used tab into focus
• Set the zoom level and type of view to the same as those used when you last closed it
• Restore the settings on the View tab of the ribbon for which “invisibles” (useful things that display on the screen but are not normally printed out) should be shown
• Open the panels (such as the Mixer, Ideas panel, etc.) that were open when you last closed it.

You can, of course, tell Sibelius which of the above things you want it to do for you, via the Display and Files pages of File > Preferences.

Notes for upgraders

If you have upgraded from Sibelius 6 or earlier, you may be a little disorientated when you first run your new version of Sibelius and see that the old menus and toolbar have been replaced by the ribbon. But don’t worry: you’ll soon get used to it, and before long you’ll find it much clearer than before. The Find in ribbon box at the top right-hand corner of the ribbon is an invaluable tool in searching for features that you have temporarily mislaid.

Here, broadly speaking, is how to find things in the ribbon according to the menus used in earlier versions of Sibelius:

• File menu items are now found in the File tab
• Edit menu items are split between the Quick Access Toolbar (for undo and redo), Home tab (for selecting, filtering, coloring and navigating) and the Appearance tab (for Magnetic Layout and Order settings). You can still access a cut-down version of the Edit menu by right-clicking on a selection in your score, just as in previous versions of Sibelius.
• View menu items are found in the View tab
• Notes menu items are split between the Appearance tab (for resetting beam groups and positions, stems and tab fingering) and the Note Input tab (for everything else).
• Create menu items are split between the Notations and Text tabs. You can still access the Create menu by right-clicking on the score window with nothing selected, just as in previous versions of Sibelius.
• Play menu items are found in the Play tab
• Layout menu items are found in the Layout tab, except for Reset Design and Reset Position, which are on the Appearance tab
• House Style menu items appear in many tabs: the various Edit... dialogs are now found by clicking the dialog launcher arrow in the appropriate ribbon group (e.g. Edit Noteheads is opened by clicking the dialog launcher arrow in the Notations > Noteheads group); the other features (including Engraving Rules and house style import/export) are on the Appearance tab.
• Plug-ins: the most useful ones appear individually on the ribbon next to related features of the program. Several tabs also have dedicated Plug-ins galleries, e.g. the Text tab has a gallery of all plug-ins to do with text and chord symbols. Also, any custom folders of plug-ins you have added will appear in the Home > Plug-ins gallery.
• Window menu items are found on the View tab
• Help menu items are found in the File tab, in the Help pane.

As far as possible, keyboard shortcuts are the same as in previous versions of Sibelius, so power users who have memorized a lot of shortcuts should feel right at home.

Related Articles

• Working with the ribbon menu in Sibelius 7
• Changes and improvements in Sibelius 7.1.3
• Changes and improvements in Sibelius 7.1.2
• Changes and improvements in Sibelius 7.0.1
• How to manually activate Sibelius 7.1 to 7.5

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