There are thousands of individual items on the menu, and it is pretty much guaranteed that some will not be where you look for them.
Find In Ribbon can often be very useful.
I am reminded of a video I saw where someone as Microsoft was explaining how the Ribbon was intended to work. There was a scene where he was talking with his wife and she could not find something.
He explained where it was, and she said something like "well I would not have looked there". He explained why it was put where it was (as in "Bar numbers are text...") and asked where she thought it should go. And she said "I don't know, but it would not have been there".
I is hard to always pick the "intuitive" place, especially for items that can be viewed through an number of different contexts. If you move items it is a sure thing that someone else will not be able to find it because they were thinking of bar numbers as text, but now they are... where? Layout, maybe?
I could often not find things in the menu either. It is probably hard to always get things right. Find In Ribbon is your friend, as is the right-click Create Menu. I also don't care much for the Ribbon galleries, but eventually you find your way around, and it works most of the time.
When Sib 7 first came out, I wrote a plugin called Where Did It Go, which listed the Sib 6 menus and where the comparable functions were on the Ribbon. (see Screenshot).
So I thought, "if I did not know how to produce a bar number change, and I was new to Sibelius, where would I look?".
In the end I did stumble onto the Create menu, because pretty much everything you wanted to add to a score was in the Create menu.
If you go through every entry in Create, and have not given up yet, you find Create > Other > Bar Number. Is that an intuitive location? It is fine if you know where it is, but it is also fine to think about bar number and Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks as bits of text and find them on the Text menu. Why are chord symbols there? Are they really text? I don't know, but where is a better location?
And I can type "bar number" into Find In Ribbon and I get to it right away. Nothing like that was available in Sib 6.
I now find Sib 6 harder to use than Sib 7 with the Ribbon. I do use the Create menu a lot. I often close the Ribbon so it only occupies a single line, just as the menu bar did. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. But I also find things in the Ribbon a lot.
I suspect that if Daniel and the crew were still here a lot of fine-tuning would have been done. Sib 7 was a placeholder, a starting point for things that never happened.
I never use Sib 6 for anything unless a client requires it or I am testing a plugin to see that it works in 6. I do 95% or more of my work in 7.5.
I don't have 8, and I am not sure if I will ever get 8 unless the bottom falls out of 7.5.
But I don't complain about the Ribbon any more.
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Bob
An experienced user of Sibelius. Sib 1.2 - 7.5, Windows 7 Pro SP 1 64 bit, 8 G RAM. Year 2015. |
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