Selecting a region would be useful with the cross staff utility. Note Mover is a kind of old-fashioned tool, not useful to much else than cross staff, in my experience.

What you are looking for would perhaps be better assigned to another tool.

Like Anders said, in my experience the I only use the note mover tool for cross staff beaming situations Finale is very clumsy in the way it handles these, needing also to use special tools to change stem direction and beam height.

What other uses for the note mover tool do you see being helped by selecting regions?

Talking of selecting regions, there's another request which has been posted here somewhere before: The Special Tools really should enable selecting regions, not as now (still) one measure at a time, one layer at a time. I would think Special Tools was a genius feature when new, but now this also has become old-fashioned. Possibly it's built on an old code deep in the program, and therefore not so easy to re-program. I'm just guessing of course. 

Jeffrey, I haven't used the Note Mover tool all that much except for recently when trying to change the enharmonic spellings of sections of my music. So for example there was an 8 measure region where I needed A-flats instead of G-sharps, but in the 8 measures directly following, G-sharps were more appropriate. And it was difficult to use the note mover's Replace All function without affecting parts of the music I didn't want affected. 

The thing is I think you're both right. I don't think the Note Mover tool is really set up for that kind of function, but there doesn't really seem to be any other graceful way of doing this in Finale. There's the Respell Notes function which relies on you selecting a region of music, but it also relies on the settings you enter into the Enharmonic Spelling settings you enter, which of course can be really useful, but also feels really clunky.

So what if the "Respell Notes" function was expanded in some way... You select a region, go to Utilities, click on Respell Notes, but now it brings up a dialogue box, one in which you have the option of changing the settings that are usually tucked away under the Enharmonic Spellings submenu OR "Choose Note," a functionality which (going off of Anders' last point) could bring up a handle on each note in the region you selected at which point you could choose one or more of the types of notes that you wish to be enharmonically respelled, go back to utilities, click Respell Notes, which brings up the dialogue box again where you now click the button "Respell." Every G-sharp you wanted respelled in your 8 measure region is changed, none of the ones outside aren't. 

I don't know, let me know if I'm really dumb and am just missing something super obvious that's already possible, but it feels like this should be fairly straightforward.

Perhaps this could be a way to go:

After changes to the spelling, select region and go to Utilities > Respell Notes. I haven't tried this myself but it might be worth a go.

Here's the link to the User manual:

http://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/FinaleMac/Content/Finale/CROMATIC.htm?Highlight=edit%20modal

Of course this is useful only if you have a lot of the same type of changes to do. If there are not that many, I would think manual adjustment would be faster.

Christopher,

I think you need to investigate the JW plugins if you're not familiar with them already. He has a "change Pitches" plugin which allows you to select a region, select a pitch, and change that pitch to another pitch. This sounds like what you're looking for. He has many other useful plugins as well.

https://www.finaletips.nu/index.php/download/category/9-plug-ins-for-windows 

Jeffrey, you beat me to it.

Jeffrey, I owe you many many thanks. 

No, we all owe Jari many, many thanks for writing these plugins.

Hi All, regarding the change of topic to JW Tools, I'm on Mac High Sierra, installed the tools but they do not appear when I click on the JW Tools entry in the Plugins menu. Any ideas? I tried leaving a message on the website.

Did you download the correct 64 bit plugin?