To me, the strangest menu location of all is "Update Smart Word Extensions and Hyphens," which is not logically under "Lyrics" but is seven notches to the left, under "Utilities."
Raymond Horton Bass Trombonist, Louisville Orchestra Minister of Music, Edwardsville (IN) UMC Composer, Arranger VISIT US AT rayhortonmusic.com On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 8:35 AM, David H. Bailey <dhbai...@davidbaileymusicstudio.com> wrote: > ... a few > versions ago Finale restructured its menus and I find many of their > decisions just as unintuitive as any ribbon structure I've seen. For > example, I've never understood why "show active layer only" was under > the "View" menu in Finale when it was really most useful while editing > and so my intuition always looked for it under the Edit menu. But I > eventually got used to it, but now it's under the Document menu! Well > practically everything in Finale works on the current Document, so why > didn't they put *everything* under the Document menu? Why take > something that has to do with how someone *views* the music or how > someone *edits* the music and place it in a menu that to my "intuition" > would most likely be where the page margins and other layout issues > would be placed? And why is "Transpose" under "Utilities" instead of > "Edit?" And why is "respell notes" under "Utilities" while "Enharmonic > Spelling" is under "Edit?" You don't edit the music with the entry > "Enharmonic Spelling" -- you tell the program how to interpret things. > So wouldn't that be a "Utility" or at the least a "Preference?" While > actually respelling the notes is part of editing the music isn't it? > Why is "Save Preferences" under "File" while the actual defining of the > preferences is under the "Edit" menu? Shouldn't everything that > pertains to "Preferences" be together? > > I don't expect any answers to my questions because there is no > justification for placing those (and other) menu items where they are in > Finale that I can see. But obviously someone found great justification > for making those decisions. I don't find the Finale menus any less > confusing that the Sibelius ribbon, and ultimately things become > comfortable once we start using them regularly. So I rarely am using > the "Find in Ribbon" feature of Sibelius these days, but I sure could > use one for Finale, which they very conveniently didn't include. I > would think that would be a utility that everybody who uses new versions > of Finale could benefit from, yet it's not under the "Utilities" menu > and not under any other menu either. > > Ultimately one person's "wow, that is so intuitive!" is another person's > "holy cow, why on earth would they hide that entry under that heading, > it makes no sense whatsoever?!" > > One great benefit of Sibelius, which I hope Finale will someday > institute natively, not requiring a plug-in, is the ability of a user to > define their own keyboard shortcuts, so the entire interface practically > can be turned into keyboard shortcuts. > > > -- > David H. Bailey > dhbai...@davidbaileymusicstudio.com > _______________________________________________ > Finale mailing list > Finale@shsu.edu > http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
