Finale Forum

Finale has plenty of fine shortcut keys, but nowhere can I find shortcut keys to actually enter a tool. I always read "select the Selection Tool" or similar, and this requires actually using a tablet, touchpad, or mouse to access.

I'm on a Mac. I may resort to creating shortcut keys through the keyboard preferences assigned specifically to Finale, but anyone knows of any secrets here, I'd love to know!

1) In the Mac version of Finale you can program eight tool metatools to the keyboard shortcuts {ctrl + one the the keys F - G - H - J - K - L - semicolon (;) - feet (')}
(on the middle row of the alphabet keyboard).

To program a tool metatool, hold down ctrl and alt, and press one of the eight keys F - G - H - J - K - L - semicolon (;) - feet (').

The dialog box Master Tool Palette appears, letting you choose the tool you want to assign to the key you pressed.



Tool metatools are document specific, so you can have different tool metatools in different documents/templates.

An example:
In one of my Finale templates I have programmed the following tool metatools:

Articulation Tool
ctrl-F

MIDI Tool
ctrl-G

Note Mover Tool
ctrl-H

Page Layout Tool
ctrl-J

Resize Tool
ctrl-K

Special Tools Tool
ctrl-L

Speedy Entry Tool
ctrl-;

Tempo Tool
ctrl-'




2) The keyboard shortcut to the Selection Tool is Shift-Command-A.

Also, pressing the escape key one or more times will finally get you to the Selection Tool.




3) When you are in the Selection Tool, double-clicking an item will get you to the tool the item belongs to:

double-clicking an expression will get you to the Expression Tool,

double-clicking a note will get you to the Simple Entry Tool,

&c.

This is amazing, exactly what I was looking for and more. Thanks so much!!

Hi...

Metatool programming works on my iMac, but not with semicolon (;) - feet (').

Is there a solution ?

Many thanks.

Welcome to the forum!

I could be wrong here, but As Far As I Know, it is a bug in Finale v25.

You should report the bug to the folks in MakeMusic’s Tech Support.
The more reports they get, the higher the priority for a bug fix.

keraunoscopia wrote:I always read "select the Selection Tool" or similar, and this requires actually using a tablet, touchpad, or mouse to access.

Or pressing the Escape key.

keraunoscopia wrote:I'm on a Mac. I may resort to creating shortcut keys through the keyboard preferences assigned specifically to Finale, but anyone knows of any secrets here, I'd love to know!

No last resort: using MacOS's shortcuts are more to be preferred than Finale's limited setup. You can specify menu "paths" with -> . So Tools->Text, as there can be other menus called Text.
I access all the main tools (except for a few that I rarely use) through keyboard shortcuts, defined in System Prefs.