I understand your philosophical temptation.“‘The rest is silence,’ and isn’t silence a thing?”
But as @mducharme nicely explains above, Dorico doesn’t wax philosophical in the same way we might.
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What’s the purpose of colouring barlines? I know coloured notes, but this looks next level.
The beauty of Dorico is that if you want to enter rests, you can.
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Steve, you have to excuse me, I was stupid after all, I didn’t get that there was already a modulation in the piece and then you wanted to transpose the whole thing in one go… 
FWIW, I happen to believe that Dorico would indeed benefit from functionality like this!
And since these last days I think Dorico has seen a positively gargantuan influx of very experienced and accomplished users, the team actually might implement features to assuage their new-found customers, who knows?
Sincerely,
Benji
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After spending a week with Dorico SE the temptation to get the Pro version at an amazingly good discount proved too much.
It’s going to take some getting used to after something like 34 years of Finale, but I seem to have decided that I’m going to enjoy the process. 
And yes, I too have been tripped up by the fact that rests are the absence of notes and spent fully half an hour trying to change the duration of a rest instead of moving the subsequent notes. I’m now working my way through the “First Steps” manual…
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You will not be disappointed 
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That’s absolutely possible in Dorico. If you want transpose a passage, select it and transpose. If you want to transpose the entire piece to a new key, DON’T select anything – do the Write/Transpose menu and DO tick the “Transpose key signatures” box (and any others you might need). Everything transposes according.
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I stuck on the first step. The installation app says it won’t accept windows 7. I have windows 11. why?
Peter, I’m late to the party, but yes, there are others. I run PsalliteDomino.com and YouTube.com/@serviamscores and I do a lot of choral work. @benwiggy does choral scores too (https://www.ancientgroove.co.uk), and he’s a very advanced user. @dan_kreider does all sorts of liturgical work (big arrangements, and full hymnals) so his bag of tricks for working with vocal music is deep.
I promise you, Dorico is an excellent program to do this type of work.
Further below in the thread, you can learn how to expand the default spacing values for galley view in Dorico. Auto padding for verses is admittedly lacking at present, and I can only imagine it will be added in due course, but you can at least increase the default spacing in the meantime to allow yourself more vertical real estate between staves.
As for making arrangements, Dorico has you covered there, too. There are options to “duplicate to staff above” and “duplicate to staff above/below” (you can set custom key commands for these if you use them often as I do). There are also cut/copy/paste, reduce, “explode” (takes a condensed chordal structure and expands it out to multiple staves), “move to staff above/below” (this is a cut/paste operation all in one).
When entering new notes, you can expand the caret to cover more than one stave at a time, and then when you enter music, it pings out to all of them at the same time. If it’s unison, the unison is duplicated to all selected staves, and if its chordal, it will distribute top down. It’s very slick and quick. Using the jump bar (or a dedicated command) you can filter for just notes, or just lyrics which makes some of the C/P operations even quicker. I use the jump bar aliases jfl for “filter lyrics” and jfn for “filter notes”, for instance. “Select more” is a real helper too: you can use it to select just a single line of lyrics, the lyrics of one measure, one stave, or the whole flow. There are also dedicated commands for filtering the first 4 lines of lyrics (as in, “filter lyric line 2”).
There is the “choir reduction” instrument which looks like a piano, but has barlines that do not intersect, thus allowing space for lyrics, and much, much more.
I encourage you that if you have specific questions about doing this type of stuff, you start a new thread (something like, “help making a choral arrangement”) and anything that is a roadblock we will help you work through.
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Again, my point being that if there is already a modulation within the song then certain options become unavailable. Eg. a song in Ab moving to A: go to the transpose window and try to move the whole thing up a semitone (A moving to Bb). You can’t
Hi @Steve_Parry,
You have to select the passage including the key signature* (with an extra command+click to select it, for example). Here below a short video showing it. You can use the calculation inside the Transpose dialogue, and after clicking Apply, you see that Dorico calculate an Augmented Unison Up. Then click on ok and it works very well:
(*) Tip: if the current key signature is C-major or A-minor, they will appear only as a signpost. Make the signposts visible and select them together with the passage, and proceed as shown ion the video.
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I have now spent a number of hours reading the manuals and working with Dorico. My conclusion, unfortunately, is that although I could ultimately almost certainly do anything with it that I can with Finale, the learning curve (particularly if you are not using it to compose or manually transcribe music) is ferociously steep, and Dorico would still make many of the things I want to do frequently significantly more difficult for me than Finale does. I really don’t think this is just because I have been using Finale for 20 years and recognize that ‘many of the things I want to do frequently’ would not be on that list for most users of either program. There is no doubt that Dorico is an amazing program, and, if I were a composer or a full-time church musician, I would almost certainly think it worth spending the time necessary to learn to use it well. However, at my age of almost 75, I suspect that I will pass away before Finale succumbs to ‘operating system creep’ and stops running on my computer, so I will probably just continue to use the old program for the hour or so a week I spend editing music.
What are you trying to do that is so very difficult? I find this work to be very easy (used finale years ago, then transitioned through Sibelius to Dorico). I’m genuinely curious what your friction points are.
That’s a very rational position!
But if you are interested in finding out if there are ways to overcome the difficult aspects, people here will be happy to help.
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Hmmm… I don’t know, it works for me. All the subsequent key changes adjust accordingly throughout the whole piece. I’ve done it regularly. Be sure that nothing is selected/highlighted before applying the transposition to the entire piece. It all changes as it should for me. 
[Windows 10]
Please see my post about this, above, and the thread I started on Monday with a feature request about it, both of which explain the problem in more detail. It’s only trying to transpose a passage in multiple keys that can run into this issue.
I add some requests I have noticed so far:
- as and educator I’d need metronome count-in also in play mode
- option to write tempo with numbers straight to tempo window
- option to remove all the (5) lines, leaving only barlines
- spacing staves individually in galley view
- note input option something like Speedy entry in Finale
I have now used Dorico about two weeks and getting to like it more and more. I hope development team could hear our former Finale users requests to make Dorico even better. Thank you!
While focusing on a particular use-case, here’s a recent thread that might help you with this, @Petri.Kangas:
@judddanby thank you, I will study that!
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