The Timeline panel

- Back in Sibelius 7.5, the navigator panel was upstaged by it's new, more complex big brother, the timeline panel. Which even took over the navigator shortcut, command, option, N, on Mac, or control, alt., N, on Windows. And of course you can also find it in the view tab panels group timeline. When you open the timeline for the first time it will likely be docked to the bottom of your score window. You can resize it, making it larger and bringing it all into view, by clicking and dragging with the cross-hair tool that appears when you place your mouse cursor between the timeline's title bar and the bottom of the score page. You can also undock the timeline panel so that it floats around your screen. I'd recommend just clicking and dragging with its title bar right here, and pulling it out of the dock like that. And if you'd ever like to re-dock the timeline, you can drag it down to the bottom. You'll get a gray area down here eventually. There it is. And when you let go, it should dock right back in there. There it goes. You can also dock it to the top of the screen as well. So, the timeline panel provides you with a very detailed, completely zoomed out map of your score from beginning to end. Highlighting and color-coating such important score landmarks as tempo markings, time-signatures, key-signatures, bar numbers, selections, comments, text, and more. The timeline's graphic interface provides a vertical list of the staves in your score, on left down here, and a horizontal display of the bars in your score, across here. If objects exist within a bar on a staff, its graphic square is colored dark-gray in the timeline. Like these here and here. If the bar contains no objects, it's colored light-gray, down here, or it can also be white. Within the timeline's main graphic interface, there's a box thinly outlined in an orange or yellow color. You can see it right here. And similar to the white area in the navigator, the outlined box in the timeline, shows you the area of your score that you're viewing in the main score-window behind it, up here. So, within this outlined box, empty bars are, again, displayed in white, while bars that contain objects continue to be displayed in a dark-gray color. To navigate using the timeline panel, simply click anywhere within the grid and your main score page will update to that location. You can also click and drag on the yellow outlined box within the timeline grid, which provides a navigation option similar to the navigator panels. Any range selected that you've made in the score, like a bar, will appear in blue or purple, depending on the type of selection that you've made here in the timeline panel. By default, the timeline panel will open in fit to view mode indicated by a purple button in the lower left-hand corner, which allows the timeline panel to display your entire score from the beginning to the end. You can use the zoom buttons on the left-hand corner to zoom in and out, showing more or less of your scores outline within the timeline panel. The important score objects, or landmarks, are color-coated and are displayed across the top of the timeline. If timeline is displaying too much information for you, or if you'd like to adjust the color-coating of the score landmarks, you can customize the timeline settings and preferences. You access the timeline page of preferences quickly by clicking on the timeline option button at the bottom of the timeline panel. Here you can decide which score objects to show and hide in your timeline panel and what color the objects are represented with. After you make changes to your timeline's preferences you can click okay to save those changes, and then those changes will be reflected in your timeline panel. Preferences are global to the application, so, those changes you make to timeline preferences will affect the timeline panel in every score that you open on your system. To close a timeline panel, you can use the close timeline button. It's over here on the Mac. It's always that red X usually, and on the P.C. or Windows machines, it's probably over on the right-hand side. You could also toggle it closed with it's shortcut, command, option, N, or control, alt., N. Or simply uncheck its box in the view tab panels group.