Creating a new Document Style

There are hundreds of variables in published music notation: thickness of the staff lines, size of the notes, distance between accidentals in a key signature, and so on. Finale will let you change settings for almost every variable you can think of.

However, you probably won’t want to set up your favorite design rules each time you create a new piece. Teaching Finale precisely how you like your music to look could take you half an hour every time you launched the program.

The good news is that Finale lets you determine all these variables once, after which it remembers your preferences for any future piece. The Finale 2010 folder houses a collection of “Document Styles,” each a collection of settings that can be applied to new files when you begin a new document using the Setup Wizard. There are several Document Styles already included with page numbers at the bottom of the page, specific music spacing rules, and so on.

Of course, you can and should create your own Document Styles, using your own favorite setup; the ones we’ve provided are meant to serve as an example. When you’re finished with these tutorials, simply create a new document (or modify one we’ve provided), edit the desired Document Options, load desired libraries, and save it in the Finale 2010/Document Styles folder.

For this tutorial we will start a document with a single treble clef staff using the “Engraved Maestro Style.”

1. From the File menu, choose New, then Document with Setup Wizard. Finale displays page 1 of the Setup Wizard. The list box on the right displays all of the available Document Styles. Ensure “Engraved Maestro Style” is selected.
2. Click Next. In the lest on the left, click the “Empty Staves” category.
3. In the middle list, double-click “Treble Clef Staff” to add it to the list on the right. Then click Next, Next, and Finish to complete the Setup Wizard. The document appears displaying the single staff in Page View.
4. From the View menu, choose Zoom, then (Custom Zoom 3) 75%. Now we need to make sure the settings are correct for our experiment.

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