Hiding staves (Staff Sets)

If you plan to work on larger orchestral scores, you may become impatient with the time it takes the computer to redraw the screen after each change you make. Fortunately, Finale can greatly speed your work up by hiding the staves in Scroll View that you’re not currently editing. If you want to permanently hide staves, see Optimizing Systems later in this tutorial.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to work just on the Violin I and Viola lines; you want to hide the blank staves so Finale won’t waste time redrawing them.

1. From the View menu, choose Scroll View.  
2. Click the Staff Tool  . First you’ll use the Staff Tool to tell Finale which staves you want to see.
3. Click the handle of the Violin I staff. Then, while pressing , click the handle of the Viola staff. -clicking allows you to select several staves one at a time, even if they’re not adjacent in the score.

Now that you’ve specified the staves, it’s time to program one of the Staff Sets.

4. While pressing and holding (Mac: ), select the View menu, then choose Program Staff Set; choose Staff Set 1 from the submenu that pops out. (Don’t release /  until you choose the Staff Set.) You’ve just programmed Staff Set 1 to display only the first and third staves. (In Finale, pressing (Mac: ) often means “I’m programming something.” In the View menu, Finale actually displays different commands depending on whether or not you were holding down the / key when you opened the menu.)

As soon as you program Staff Set 1, the two blank staves vanish. They’re still part of the piece; they’re just hidden for the moment. Furthermore, you can rearrange staves in each Staff Set—dragging them up or down as much as you want—without disturbing the staff order in the “full-score” view.

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