Change your shortcuts to open a dialog instead of a gallery

Sibelius is well-regarded for using intuitive keyboard shortcuts to perform common tasks in a musical score. In Sibelius 7 or later, several of these one-stroke shortcuts open what are known as galleries: menus which list options organized by category. Several of these galleries, and their corresponding shortcuts, are:

• K: Key signatures
• L: Lines (several lines have their own shortcuts, like “H“airpins and “S“lurs)
• Q: Clefs (or “Q”lefs, because the letter C is reserved for entering the note C)
• T: Time signatures
• Z: Symbols (or “Z”ymbols, because the letter S is reserved for slurs, as noted above)

Galleries, like the one for time signatures displayed above, can help you make quick work of entering common notational elements; for example, you can either manually type in your time signature or choose from among those that are most often used. Any time signature that you place in your score will automatically appear in the Used category at the top of the gallery, on the reasonable assumption that if you’re predisposed to a certain meter, you’re likely to use it more than once.

This is all very handy, but it’s a change from how Sibelius 6 and earlier worked. (See this recent post for a useful primer on transitioning from Sibelius 6 to 7.5.) In those versions, pressing the keyboard shortcut would bring up a dialog (a window with buttons), like this one for time signatures:

Here, there are fewer of the more commonly used meters from which to choose, but there are also many more advanced options, like the ability to switch on or off the defaults of rewriting bars and allowing cautionary signatures; the option to place a pickup bar, and a button which opens yet another dialog where you can specify the beam and rest groups (subdivisions) of a bar. (This is also where the option to separate tuplets from adjacent notes lives.)

This dialog (and other similar ones for key signatures, clefs and symbols) still exists in Sibelius 7 and 7.5. In order to access it, though, you’ll need to click More Options at the bottom of the gallery:

If you only need to access these options occasionally, an extra click every now and then is not too heavy of a burden. But if you find yourself in these advanced dialogs more often than not, all the extra clicks add up to more steps compared to how things worked in Sibelius 6.

Fortunately, you can program Sibelius 7 or later versions to call up these dialogs with the usual keystrokes. To do so, go to File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts. Let’s continue with time signatures for our example:

• Under Tab or category, select Notations tab
• Under Feature, select Show Time Signature dialog
• Click Add
• The Add Keyboard Shortcut dialog appears. Type T and click OK
• Sibelius will warn you that the shortcut is already being used for another function (the time signature gallery). Click Yes to override it
• Click OK to exit Preferences

From now on, while you’re working in your score, pressing T will open the time signature dialog, just as it did in Sibelius 6. You can program your other shortcuts for the other dialogs, if you like.

If you’re hooked on programming shortcuts to help your workflow, or want to know more about shortcuts in general, check out these other posts on the blog:

• Set a shortcut to export PDFs in Sibelius
• Quick keyboard access to your Sibelius plug-ins
• Command and control in Sibelius
• Customize keyboard shortcuts in Sibelius and Dorico
• Add custom shortcuts for Keypad features in Sibelius
• Use keyboard shortcuts to apply text expressions in Sibelius
• Save time with six speedy Sibelius selection shortcuts
• Get smarter with smart quotes
• Stick to it with sticky tuplets, slurs and lines
• Quick tip: Move notes up or down chromatically
• Use the semicolon to input grace notes in Sibelius; save time