Photo Credit: Sergey Petrov

Your score is finished, and it looks great. But before anyone can perform your music you’ll need to prepare and edit your parts. Prior to the introduction of Linked Parts in Finale 2007, you had to extract parts before you could edit them. While you could set page formatting options for the parts before extracting, in practice this often necessitated some time consuming trial and error before arriving at your desired layout settings.

With Linked Parts, you can view any part in your score, at any time, from Document Menu > Edit Part. While Finale’s default part layout settings are often sufficient, if you have specific layout needs you can quickly edit these defaults and apply them to all parts in your score without the need to extract, spot-check, and repeat.

I answered many questions related to this topic in my days as a technical support agent. Sometimes users would be so used to the old way of doing things they’d just assume they’d have to layout each individual part of their orchestral score; it was a fun call when I could point someone in the direction of the Manage Parts options, and save them so much time.

By following the steps below, hopefully you can save some time as well:

1. Navigate to Document Menu > Manage Parts > Part Creation Preferences > Page Format for Parts.
2. In the Page Format for Parts dialog, set your desired page size, orientation, and margin values then press OK.
3. In the Part Creation Preferences dialog, set your desired options for multimeasure rests, music spacing, and how many measures Finale should place in each system, then press OK.
4. In Manage Parts, click Generate Parts.

Now go to Document Menu > Edit Part and select a part to see your results. While some situations may require some additional editing, I’ve found this process to be a huge timesaver.

Let us know how part layout is working for you by clicking on “Comments” below.