Locking sections of a score.

[turtlethom]

I am fairly new to Sibelius. I am wondering about something and perhaps someone here can enlighten me.

It seems quite easy to inadvertently change something you've been working on in a score, sometimes drastically, before you even know it. Forgetting to hit the escape key, thinking you are in one mode but are really in another and suddenly you have destroyed something you spent time creating. Yes, you can undo if you know when exactly you went off track but that is sometimes iffy. But I do know there are myriad ways to screw up. This has happened to me a few times, especially when I'm working under a deadline (which is always).

In Excel, you can of "lock" cells that are complete so that, for instance, you don't accidentally delete a formula, or change a column of numbers, etc. Does Sibelius have a way to "lock" bars or sections of a score while you work on other bars or sections? If not, that would be a very useful tool and not that difficult to implement.

Is this a problem for anyone else?

Thanks in advance,

Thomas

[andyg]

I've never found such a feature.

So we're back to the old school way of doing things. Ctrl-S (Cmd-S for you) before you make any major changes, Ctrl-S frequently, and if you're going to 'experiment' with a score, then work on a copy.

Sibelius does have Autosave (though don't rely on such features in any programme) so you should in theory be able to go back and pick up from a point before you messed up!

[turtlethom]

Thanks, Andy. I do save often. Sometimes, in the heat of a creative moment or a rushing deadline, I forget. And sometimes, having composed a few bars I’m excited about, I will do something inadvertent that messes up something in a previous section. Now if I save the new work, I’m also saving the damaged work. Of course I can copy the new work to a different file, then close, not save and paste the new stuff back in. I had one terribly day where I accidentally made extensive changes to a previous section without realizing it, saved and then had to go back through previous saves to find the part I changed, copy it and paste it back in. It is all doable. And I don’t mean to make a big deal of this. I can get through my work without that feature.

That said, locking is certainly a simpler solution that would provide an easy way to avoid “accidents” and provide peace of mind (certainly worth something). And you can always unlock a bar or section to make changes. The Excel model is actually easy and elegant and I wouldn’t imagine a heavy programming lift.

In any case, thanks for responding. I’m relatively new to Sibelius. I used Finale for some time but found it overly complex. They don’t have a locking bar feature either. Cheers.

[MikeLyons]

You can lock the whole score for editing, but not sections.
If you are interested in preserving the layout, you can use "make into page" or add manual page breaks.

Every time you save, sibelius saves a current copy if the file, numbered sequentially in the backup folder (defaults to c:users\[username]\documents\sibelius\backup scores on windows). I've set my total number of backups to 3000. At one time you could have really large numbers, but they have changed that recently. My image doesn't show many backups because I have moved the backup folder to an external drive in file-->preferences-->saving and exporting

Don't bother with autosave. It doesn't do what every other program in the history of computing does.

[turtlethom]

Thanks, Mike. All useful information.
Thomas