When you’re working with a Sibelius file, it can be helpful to have several parts open at once in order to easily cycle through them, or to make batch changes to them using the Multiple Part Appearance dialog (accessed by going to Parts > Part Appearance > Open Parts.
You can click the + near the right of the screen to open a new tab with a different part, and keep doing that to open all the parts that you wish. But Bob Zawalich’s Open Selected Parts plug-in not only makes it faster to open just the parts you want, but it also quickly closes unwanted parts at the same time.
Once you’ve installed the plug-in, run it to open or close the parts you wish. There are actually two variants of the plug-in: Open Selected Parts and Open Selected Parts Checkbox. They do the same thing; it’s just a matter of your interface preference for either highlighting the part name or placing a check mark next to the one you want to open.
In either case, when you run the plug-in, the selected parts will open, and the ones not selected will be closed.
You’ll see the results reflected in the document tabs:
From here, you can quickly switch from one tab to the next by using the keyboard shortcut Control-Tab.
A few years ago I demonstrated this and five other useful plug-ins in this tutorial video, as well as instructions on how to go about installing and using plug-ins. It’s still just as relevant today as when I first created the video!
Open Selected Parts may be downloaded directly through Sibelius 7 and higher at File > Plug-ins > Install Plug-ins > Other. Users may also install it manually in Sibelius 7 or higher by visiting the plug-in download page and following the usual manual installation procedure, or by using the Install New Plug-in plug-in.
Bob Zawalich
Thanks for mentioning this, Philip.
I wrote this early in Sib 7 because they did not include the ability to open multiple parts, as they did in Sib 6. When I wrote it there was no support for multi-select list boxes, so I implemented my own “checkbox” list boxes.
Later in Sib 7, Sibelius provided plugin support for real multi select list boxes, so I redid the plugin to use them, but some people liked the checkboxes better, probably because it is not as easy to click wrong and lose all the settings – so I provided both versions.
I had thought that this plugin might get included in Sibelius as a shipping plugin, but that was around the time things began really falling apart in Sibland.
But if you install it and provide a shortcut you can forget that it is a plugin, and just treat it like a part of Sibelius that should have been there in the first place…
Anyway, it is a useful plugin and I am glad you drew some attention to it.
Philip Rothman
Bob, thanks for that additional info.