Over the past couple of years I have worked on two operas for a long-standing client.  This means many, many characters.  Initially lyrics were entered in kind of a stream-of-consciousness method, not really thinking things thru.  This created a nightmare situation further down the road when staging created myriad edits to many of the characters, involving cuts, extensions, and loads of lyric changes.  Moreover, the first opera was in two acts and each act was over 1800 measures.  Breaking it into scenes was the main sanity-saviour.

I decided that the best approach was to have each character in its own verse.  This made future editing much more manageable and it also prevented Finale from taking an eternity to just open the Lyrics window.

Which brings me to my suggestion:  how hard would it be to have a Search field in the Lyrics window?  That was one could search for a specific word or syllable.  There is a viable workaround by using the Selection Tool and double-clicking on the syllable in the score and then hitting Cmd-L; then the selection is hilighted.   But a search field could streamline edits when having to move from verse to verse to verse without having to constantly go back to the score.

I know this is not a huge deal for the usual lead sheet or piano vocal song, but for operas etc., it could be a huge timesaver.

J D Thomas ThomaStudios