Dear Ms. Harris:
Thanks for your message. I saw a Dorico tutorial on the internet RE chord entry was turned off by the fact that it seemed that ALL chord entry must be done note-by-note. A member of the chat room explained to me that this is not so. I’ve tried it myself, and indeed it’s true. However, the tutorial almost scared me away from buying. Perhaps it might be a good idea to redo it? It certainly almost scared me off.
Best wishes,
Dace Gisclard
may be you were looking at the wrong tutorial…
You can input whole chords at once, using a midi keyboard.
Dear LAE,
Thanks again. I got a very nice e-mail from Miss Harris this morning. I certainly don’t expect personalized attention, but the chord issue is important to me because a great deal of the work I do is transposing songs for singers, which, of course, involves a piano part.
MY wife found a copy of the DORICO manual online this morning. I’m undecided as to whether to read it cover-to-cover, or should I wait for the TV mini-series?–JOKE! JOKE!
Best wishes,
Dace Gisclard
Did you happen to watch at least the chord entry video in my earlier post?
I found it pretty helpful, and hope that you do as well.
Last time I checked this was the Dorico Forum 
WHAT!??! How the heck did that get in there?? I’ll fix it! (After checking that you’re correct, of course…
)
Thanks for catching that bizarre typo? iPad auto-mangle?, @PjotrB.
Well, I was browsing online for DORICO’s chord entry features–this was the only one that came up. My wife found the complete manual online–should I read it cover-to-cover, or wait for the TV miniseries?–JOKE! JOKE!
For some reason, that ‘Finale’ thing pops up a lot lately…
Make sure it’s for version 5. Older manuals tend to float to the top of search results because they’ve accumulated more mouse clicks. When in doubt, get the PDF here:
@double8range
are you actually talking about Chord Symbol input or are you talking about Chord input?
To notate a piano part for a classical singer you are probably a piano player yourself and can easily use a midi keyboard.
Dear KB,
Yes I am a pianist, or WAS before the stroke. I can still get around a MIDI keyboard, just not speed–although this kind of input doesn’t call for that!
Thanks,
Dace
Gotcha! Thanks.
Dace
Sure, and all this in 3 hours and 3 bars of music. So much better! As I said somewhere else. Finale is perfectly fine, and all this pseudo-discussion about what is better are just tedious. But in ters of functionalities (things that the program can do to speed up the writing) I will believe that Dorico is better than Finale when it will be able do what Finale can do with the JW plug-ins. For what i have seen it is not even close.
As a Finale user who only used Speedy Entry rather than Simple Entry, I did use the arrow keys to fine-tune getting the pitch selected and dragged upwards. But as a new Dorico user, I’m finding this even easier. While I am not sure I will readily remember the keyboard commands to move pitches up and down, the one to transpose by an octave is helpful, as is the Jump Bar, for which I’ve already added T as the command to get me the transposition dialogue (similar to right-clicking on Transpose… in Finale).
But also, one can select notes and drag them up and down. That seems better for me than what I went through trying to use the up and down keys in Speedy Entry to navigate an often small editing window.
JW are good for sure. But the fact that we all needed them, along with Patterson (also very useful for some things, apart from the beaming gussying up that was never really critical or needed), the no-longer-supported TGTools and the very expensive and complicated Perfect Layout says a lot. Yes, it was great to run various .lua scripts as well, but it looks to me like you can run .lua in Dorico just fine so long as they are written for the app, so perhaps that might be useful?
I used to rely on a .lua script to create dashed barlines throughout the score with one click. That was needed because I had no good way to have Finale use dashed barlines by default-nothing ever stuck in the Document Options in that specific regard for barlines. With Dorico, I set the default and it works. No need for that script.
I also had to recently use a very good .lua script to set the selection scope, since Finale didn’t do it reliably or clearly. No more need for that. Same with a create ties script, etc.
So yes, the plugins were useful for Finale. But aside from a small number like Rhythm Copy, none were that critical to me and many things I could do with the JW plugins are already in Dorico.
Who are you, and what have you done with David Toub…? 
Seriously, I’m really pleased that you’ve overcome some of your initial trepidation, and are embracing the ways that Dorico can help to make music easier and faster.
Change after three decades is hard. But not impossible.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” - Abraham Lincoln
I’d rather spend an hour to figure out how to write 3 bars of music properly, using shortcuts, than to spend the next 6 months composing in Finale, importing XML, and cursing my way through. I think the hard work at the beginning pays dividends at the end.
Two basic ways that Doric is better than Finale - note input. In Finale, no matter where my cursor was, the notes would input sometimes 2 or 3 octaves too high or low. I contacted support and they were of no help. Also, after I typed a note using the shortcut, I still had to use the arrow key to advance, whereas with Doric, it advances for me. Yesterday I was transcribing some work and found that the only thing slowing me down was that I was so accustomed to Finale (a user since 2001) being clunking that I was forgetting the super easy shortcuts in Doric.
thanks so much for taking the time to answer…I am trying. Sometimes I am going along great… and then WHAM… what the heck? What happened? How do I fix that? .just takes practice and reviewing the videos and asking questions.
Hi everyone! Yes, another Finale migrant here. Been spending the last couple of weeks building a master template and getting to grips with working in a different way. Really enjoying getting to know Dorico but there are a couple of things I can’t quite work out which are integral to the way I work.
I do a lot of TV stuff which happens very quickly where I need to be able to change and update parts in real time. One of the things is being able to transpose a song immediately end export the PDFs. I’ve found the transposition window and it works great until there are key changes within the song. Then some options don’t appear within the dropdown menus. A lot of the time the transposition is up/down a semitone and that option isn’t there…
Another thing is having the rehearsal marks showing ‘verse’, ‘chorus’ etc. rather than letters/numbers/bar numbers. I know this has been addressed by other users previously. I have been using Text to input this which works fine but was wondering if there is another solution I’m missing.
Finally, I need to be able to have all rehearsal markings down the lefthand side of the page in all parts. Is there a global way of doing that? (In Finale I would go to each bar in the score with a rehearsal mark and click on ‘begin new staff system’.) The way I’m doing it at the moment is to add system breaks in one part and using propagation to duplicate in the other parts. The problem I’ve found is that this adds a frame break to the first system which messes up the set number of systems I have in the casting off settings. It also turns system breaks into frame breaks for each new page on all other parts…
Sorry for the long post…!