I think I most want to do this when swapping music between distant staves, or creating cresc/dim - but I miss the ability in Sibelius to select a passage in one staff then command click a different staff and have the full passage selected. Currently in Dorico if I have several bars of music selected in one staff I then either have to shift click the other staff and deselect everything on the staves in between, tediously command click on the individual bars (making sure I don’t accidentally select a note and then select the bar, subsequently deselecting the note I accidentally selected and then having to reselect it), or do a marquee selection which can be a bit of a time waster if I’m selecting material that extends off screen, and otherwise requires a fair bit of mouse movement that could be condensed to a single click. If I’m missing something, any other workflow tips would be appreciated.
Yes, I understand where you’re coming from. When we first started designing Dorico, one of the things I felt most strongly about was that we should try, as far as possible, to do without the different kinds of selections that Sibelius has (single selection, multiple selection, passage selection, system passage selection) and have a much simpler approach: something is either selected, or it is not.
On the whole I’m very happy with how that decision has worked out, but it does mean that some of the advanced things you can do with passage selections in Sibelius can’t be done so easily in Dorico, and this kind of thing is among them. I will have a think about how we might introduce a feature to accommodate this in future, perhaps a command something like “make selection extent match on all staves”, which would look at all the staves with at least one selected item, and then try to select all items in the range between the earliest and latest selections across all of the staves with a selection.