When you’ve opened the Scarborough Fair score, the music appears, looking somewhat like this:

Minimize ribbon
Title bar button Window buttons

Ribbon tabs Help button

The ribbon
Document tabs Switch tab
Open new tab

Information Status bar Document view Zoom controls

read-outs buttons

Open score in Sibelius

Introducing the Ribbon

The ribbon is the wide band of command buttons that appears at the top of the Sibelius window, housing all of the features of the pro-
gram, organized according to task.

The ribbon provides 11 tabs for Sibelius | Ultimate and 10 tabs for Sibelius. The File tab is different from the other tabs; it lets you import
and export files in different formats, print, access special learning and teaching features, get detailed help – the whole of  1. File tab
in the Reference Guide is devoted to this.The other tabs are ordered roughly according to the order in which you typically perform tasks
while working on a score, so as you make your way from the start of a project towards its end, you will typically work your way through
the tabs of the ribbon from left to right.

The remaining tabs contain the following kinds of commands, organized into groups:
Home Basic score setup operations, like adding or removing instruments (staves) and bars, plus key editing operations, including clip-
board operations and Sibelius’s powerful filters—see  2. Home tab in the Reference Guide.
Note Input Commands relating to alphabetic, step-time and Flexi-time input, plus note editing operations, including switching voices,
and compositional tools such as explode/reduce and transformations such as retrograde, inversion, and so on—see  3. Note Input tab
in the Reference Guide.
Notations All of the basic markings that are not notes, including clefs, key and time signatures, special barlines, lines, symbols, note-
head types, and so on—see  4. Notations tab in the Reference Guide.
Text Font style and size controls, choice of text style, plus lyrics, chord symbols, rehearsal marks, and bar and page numbering op-
tions—see  5. Text tab in the Reference Guide.
Play Choice of playback configuration, transport control, Live Tempo, Live Playback, and options for how Sibelius should interpret the mark-
ings in your score during playback—see  6. Play tab in the Reference Guide.
Layout Document setup options such as page and staff size, staff spacing, hiding staves, Magnetic Layout options, plus formatting con-
trols—see  7. Layout tab in the Reference Guide.

Opening a Score