Troubleshooting Sibelius Import - Missing Structural Elements

I recently encountered an issue with Sibelius import which requires troubleshooting, where certain structural elements of a file such as double bar lines, rehearsal marks and tempo markings were not being imported when using the Import feature in the File menu, importing from one Sibelius file (the original) to another (the template).

I've discovered that there is a key thing to remember:

All bars of the template file MUST BE EMPTY.

This means no notes or stave text of any kind attached to these bars. To avoid hidden text in the file, consider making the template a single bar. System text, e.g. tempo, title, composer etc. is OK and doesn’t affect import. However, consider that the import feature will import many of these text fields from the importing file, so you may be better off leaving them out of one or other file to avoid duplicates. Or duplicated can be deleted after import.

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The Issue

I was trying to import into this template file, which has instrument labels attached to bar 1 (to instruct doubling musicians which instrument to use, and make it easier for the orchestrator to update this at the start of each orchestration):

Template file to import to (with save text in bar 1)

The original file I was importing has double bar lines at bar 2/3:

Original file to import (with double barlines at bar 2/3)

When importing the Piano (Keys) stave from the original file into the template, as you can see from the preview on the right, the double barlines in bar 2/3 are missing, as well as the document title, composer and tempo:

Import attempt - Missing barlines etc.

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The Solution

Delete all stave text in bar 1 (or any bars of the template)

After deleting the instrument labels from bar 1 of the template file and importing the Keys stave, this is the resulting preview:

Updated preview including structural elements

The double barlines and tempo are imported correctly, along with the title, composer and lyricist fields, which in this case will need to be deleted.

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Workaround Pros & Cons

The downside to this workaround is that no time-saving fields such as instrument labels can be added to the first (or any) bar of a template score.

An alternative, unsatisfactory solution is to keep the text in bar 1 then go through the score and add in the missing structural elements. But of course this can be incredibly time-consuming, especially in larger scores involving many key and time signature changes, and defeats the point of the import feature.

A preferred workaround is to keep a separate template file with the text labels or other first bar info that is copied and pasted into each new score AFTER importing the music from another file. All labels can be selected (using Cmd+Click on Mac, or using an advanced filter), then pasted into the template document. They'll paste in order on the correct staves, as long as staves haven't been added, removed or reordered since importing.

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Sibelius Import - Future Improvements

A useful future improvement to this feature would be a tickbox option to import title, subtitle, composer, lyricist, headers, footers and copyright fields, so that there’s a choice depending on the file/template contents.