Solution: Accessing and navigating Worksheet Creator - Sibelius Tutorial

(techno music) - [Instructor] The Worksheet Creator in Sibelius is a database of more than 17,000 Sibelius files in the .sib file format that consist of exercises, flashcards, repertoire and a variety of other content. The files contained within the Worksheet Creator are categorized so that you can search through and find what you need relatively quickly. Once a file is open from the Worksheet Creator it'll be just like any other Sibelius file. It'll be yours to freely edit, save and use in whatever way you choose. One unfortunate thing about the Worksheet Creator is that it's only accessible from within the File tab of an open Sibelius Score. So let's quickly double-click on a New Score manuscript file to open something randomly just to have access to the File tab. Then from the File tab, go down and select Teaching and then click on the large Worksheet Creator button. Now I should mention that this lesson will only cover a small portion of the Worksheet Creator's functionality, just some basic searching for and opening of materials. If you have an interest in learning more about the Worksheet Creator I encourage you to look it up in the Sibelius reference guide. It should be of particular interest to those of you who might be teaching K through 12 music. Once the Worksheet Creator is open there will be several pages of options to sort through before opening a Worksheet Creator file. I'm going to give you a breakdown of the different pages and options as you use this feature to search for and open a variety of materials. The pages in the Worksheet Creator do not have names. So I'll refer to them by other means, mostly by number in the order of their appearance. So on the first page here of the Worksheet Creator, you can start by making a decision about the type of material that you would like to open. Whether you want to search through the teaching and learning materials or create your own worksheet from a template. For this lesson, we're going to leave teaching and learning materials selected. In the upper right-hand corner you can set up a page size for the materials and I'd recommend leaving that set to Letter size for now. There's another large section below the Page Size where you can check the options that you would like to include on either the students sheet or the answer sheet if you choose to open an actual worksheet. It's really only necessary to have these options checked if you're going to be opening a traditional worksheet that contains questions and answers. We can leave them checked for now so that you can see them in action but later when we open some standard repertoire we'll be unchecking all of these options so that we don't accidentally end up with a name and date field on the first page of our music. So go ahead and click Next in the bottom right corner to move to page two. On the second page of the Worksheet Creator you can make decisions about the type of material you'd like to search for. You can choose whether you need material for individual students, small groups of students or groups of any size. You can also choose to search for worksheets that can be completed on paper, at the computer or by performing. Hopefully this opens your eyes to the amount and types of materials you'll have access to. For now leave the Size of group and How to use settings set to Any because that will allow you to browse through all of the 17,000 plus available Worksheet Creator files. Go ahead and click Next and Sibelius will search for all of the Worksheet Creator files. And beware the first time that you do this on a computer it can take quite some time for Sebelius to uncompress all of the files. Be patient. The process will be much faster the next time you use the Worksheet Creator. All right. And the next page you arrive at is the page that lists several worksheet categories up here for you to choose from. If you've searched for all materials you should see the same six categories that are on my screen. From here you can select the category that you think contains the type of worksheet or file you're looking for. The numbers in parentheses next to the category names represent the number of worksheets in the category that fit your search parameters followed by the total number of worksheets in each category. Note that if you want to narrow down the type of material you're searching for in each category of it further you can use the Previous button down here to return to the previous page or you can click the Change Type of Material button to refine your search. For now let's choose Elements of Music and click Next. From this point forward by selecting a category on the left and clicking Next you'll either arrive at another category page which contains subcategories for you to search through or you'll finally arrived at a worksheet page which lists the worksheets within the category and the subcategories that you've chosen. So to navigate to a worksheet page I'm going to click through all of the first categories up here very quickly. You can take your time and choose whatever categories you'd like to arrive at whatever type of worksheet or material you'd like. I'm going to choose Notes & Rests and click Next. Note Duration and click Next. And Match Notes with Names and click Next. So eventually as you filter through the different categories you'll arrive at a worksheet page like this one which lists the worksheets or files on the left and shows the description of the selected Worksheet Creator file on the right. I've ended up with a list of eight worksheets for matching notes with their names. These will be pre-designed worksheets, student and answer sheets that you'll be able to open, print and hand out to students as note naming exercises. You can click on the name of each individual worksheet in your list, read the description of that worksheet and when you think you found the right worksheet for you, go ahead and click Next. After you choose a worksheet you'll end up at a Preview page like this one which shows the worksheet as it will eventually appear when it's opened in Sibelius. If you've chosen an actual worksheet like I have, you'll actually see a preview of two worksheets. The Student Sheet and the Answer Sheet. In this case, if you're a teacher of young musicians, you'll probably realize right now that Sibelius has done a lot of work for you. And remember, there are many more worksheets just like these surrounding a variety of musical topics that you have complete access to. At this stage it's important to inspect the file carefully on the Preview page before committing to it and clicking Finish. Once you open a file from the Preview page in the Worksheet Creator the only way to go back to your search list is to reopen the Worksheet Creator and to go through the entire search process all over again and that can take some time. So if the worksheet in the Preview is not what you're looking for click Previous to go back to the list of worksheets and search through them again and when you find the worksheet that you want click Finish and Sibelius will open it as a Sibelius file and will exit you out of the Worksheet Creator. Worksheets will open in their own top-level score window. Student Sheets and Answer Sheets, if they exist for your worksheet will open in separate top-level windows. Whether you're a teacher or have use for these types of worksheets or not the good thing about opening worksheets is that they often contain unconventional notations. Once you open a Sibelius file that has unconventional notations like this one does you can examine it to discover how those notations were handled or created in Sibelius. Selecting all will reveal a lot. You can see I have a lot of hidden objects and some sort of special staff type. By now you should be able to look at something complex like this and have an idea of how you would recreate it in Sibelius. Worksheets tend to go against the natural tendencies of the application and are some of the hardest things to create. So it's a fun exercise to try to recreate them. So I've given you a thorough walkthrough of the Worksheet Creator. I would encourage you at this point to pause and spend some time rummaging through the Worksheet Creator a bit more to see what types of other materials are available for you and how someone was able to accomplish creating them in the application. Next, we'll spend some time searching for and choosing some standard repertoire from the Worksheet Creator so that we can begin our creative arranging project.