I second Christopher on this! The advantages outweigh the disadvantages by a 
long way.

I suppose a lot of this discussion will be influenced by the type of work you 
do. In pure engraving work where final output will never be altered, then 
extracted parts are fine. But for those working on projects for clients who 
change their minds, or material that you may need to update, re-cycle, make 
cuts/additions, then linked parts are extremely useful and save hours of 
endless repetitive changes. The larger the ensemble - the more time saved, as 
with ext. parts there will be more files to open.

Someone mentioned earlier about having different font sizes in Score and Parts, 
well, this is possible in linked parts with a little time spent on which items 
show in the score and which in the parts (show/hide). You just need to put in 
two instances of each item, then have show in part only and show in score only. 
I frequently place larger rehearsal markings (numbers/letters) in the score to 
the parts as it is easier to read for the MD and not so large in the part that 
it takes up all the space. Things like this once done are easliy replicated, or 
saved into templates, after which you fly!

In Fin 25 you can have different size/styles in time signatures for the score 
and the parts.

Things I DON’T LIKE are:

Grace note spacing, especially on staves with 2 instruments
Cue notes on staves with 2 instruments
Cue notes on staves where there are multiple versions of the parts (Tuba in C, 
Bb bass clef, Bb treble clef)

All said and done, Finale is superb application. I’ve used it since version 1.0 
it has constantly evolved over the last 25 years. I work mainly in musical 
theatre and band scores and it is so adaptable to that medium.  Eventually yes, 
you will arrive at a point where there is precious little that can be done to 
improve the bulk of the application and I think it’s good that MM scrapped the 
annual system of upgrades for minor improvements, sometimes not even appealing 
to the general user, not worth the fee and sometimes buggy in trying to reach 
deadlines.

What is very frustrating now is the problems involved in upgrading older Finale 
files (pre-2005) with the new system softwares which we are all really obliged 
to embrace at some point. I have a stack of older files dating back to 1993 
which I must find time update as I fear they will one day become impossible to 
open. The upside of this (in ref. to Linked parts) is that I will only really 
need to update the scores and not the thousands of extracted parts as it will 
be quicker to load up a page format library and create new parts. 

Jonathan


> On 23 Apr 2018, at 08:49, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> From: Christopher Smith <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>>
> Subject: Re: [Finale] Finale Linked Parts: what's missing?
> Date: 22 April 2018 at 23:51:34 
> To: <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
> 
> 
> Ooh, ooh, ooh! I got this!
> 
> Fewer files is a HUGE time saver! You can enter all the cues with copy and 
> paste (or the plugin, which I find buggy) without pasting between documents, 
> you can change the font sizes for tempi and rehearsal letters ONCE (or 
> anything else ONCE) and have it apply to all parts at once, if you find 
> something colliding in all parts you move it ONCE and it is solved 
> everywhere, and you can take advantage of JW Copy Part Layout to regularize 
> the page layout. Later edits, too, have to be done twice (once in the score 
> file, once in the part file) but in extracted parts you have to make edits in 
> ALL files, which can be maddening.
> 
> Christopher
> 
> 
>> On Apr 22, 2018, at 5:38 PM, Lee Actor <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> Makes sense.  It seems to me you'd also be able to change the tempo marking 
>> font size in the linked parts score; I change several global settings in the 
>> version of the score I extract parts from that I want to apply to all parts 
>> and not to the score.
>> 
>> With two separate copies of the score, though, I don't see the advantage of 
>> linked parts over extracted parts, other than fewer files.  How does this 
>> save time and effort?
> 

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