Sibelius will take a while to start up. This is especially true if this is the first time that you’ve used Sibelius since turning on your computer.
Once Sibelius has fully started a “quick start” dialog will appear. The options in this dialog can all be found in the file menu, but they are all presented here for convenience.
There is a check box labelled “show this dialog each time Sibelius starts”. Unchecking this box will prevent the quick start dialog from appearing however, it is very strongly recommended that you leave this box checked. The reason for this is that JAWS is not able to detect when Sibelius is ready unless the quick start dialog opens.
If, for some reason, you set the quick start dialog to not show each time Sibelius starts, you can easily switch it back to the default behaviour by doing the following:
If you really do object to using this dialog, then just press escape when it opens, and you’ll be placed in Sibelius’ main window. You can then access the file menu an do things the old fashioned way.
When the dialog opens, you will be placed in a group of seven radio buttons, one for each of the options you have available. Each of these options has a hot key which you may want to learn.
When the “open recent file” or “tutorial videos” buttons are checked, another list becomes available. This will either show the ten most recent scores, or the list of tutorial videos which can be found on the Sibelius website.
The three most useful things that you can do in this dialog are:
The “open recent score” option is checked when the dialog opens, so if you want this option, you only need to press tab once, choose a file and press enter.
Most of the other options will simply open a dialog which is available from the file menu at any time. For instance, choosing “open another file” will open the open dialog.
You may find that some scores, with a lot of instruments, take a while to open. This is because it can take time to load all of the sounds which Sibelius uses to playback the score.