68: Space between staves - adjusting globally

Sibelius 2 includes sophisticated tools for adjusting staff spacing in your score, including rulers, the ability to drag a staff throughout a score simply by triple-clicking, new keyboard shortcuts for adjusting staves more accurately, and the Align Staves dialog that allows you to copy the staff alignment from one part of your score to another. See Staff spacing in your Sibelius 2 User Guide for more details.

All of these features are also in Sibelius 3 and later which also has an optical spacing algorithm for note spacing.

If you don't yet have Sibelius 5, get an upgrade.

You can alter the spacing between staves in earlier versions of Sibelius as follows. Note that this procedure works only with either empty scores (i.e. you should create all the necessary bars and instruments before you begin) or with scores which don't have yet a fixed layout (i.e. no system breaks, page breaks or locked format of any kind), because with this procedure you will lose all layout information.

1. Select the whole score (Command-A or Ctrl+A), or the passage where you want adjust the distances
2. Choose Make into System (Layout menu) - the result can look pretty funny depending on the size of the score)
3. Move the desired staves to the position you want by clicking and dragging
4. Choose Unlock Format (Layout menu), and the new distances will now apply to all pages.

Depending on the size of the score and the speed of the computer some steps of this procedure can take some time. This does not mean that the computer has crashed.