Muse Score

The handbook says, if I remember right, "To get a courtesy accidental, just drag it from the palette." Easy enough. But it doesn't work. It does nothing at all. So I found at a forum what should have been more clearly explained in the handbook: "To get a courtesy accidental, select the note so that it turns blue, drag the accidental from the palette and hold it over the note (not beside it, where it is supposed to go) so that the note turns red, then release. To add parentheses, do the same." Easy as pie, actually.
Finding the answer took me at least half an hour of reading debates about whether or when to use courtesy accidentals, and other problems with accidentals, and which editions of Muse Score had which problems with them. The solution, when I discovered it, was in something that was mentioned only in passing.
Years ago I used to be a statistical typist. One of my most successful experiences was typing up charts of various kinds with columns of numbers. On an old-fashioned typewriter you had to count, add, subtract and divide to get the spacing of the columns and headers just right and make them look nice. I found it easy and fun. To get spacing right with a computer is not easy and not fun. (That's why I do everything on a spread sheet, rather than setting tabs or using tables or charts.) In this music program I have to figure out all sorts of spacing issues which are affected by one another, which sometimes causes a function to do the opposite of what you think it will. I have to consider staff and system spacing, accolade spacing, measure spacing, headings, line breaks, chords, lyrics, percentage of page fill, and to figure out why page two acts differently from page one, etc. (--and learn the terms in Hebrew, because they kindly gave me a mostly-Hebrew version when I downloaded it, without giving me a language choice.) When the handbook doesn't give sufficient explanation, I go to a forum where the musician-computerists debate what's the correct way to write music, the differences between musician logic and computer logic, and all sorts of issues that are incredibly interesting except that they are over my head and I don't have time for it all. Sometimes I feel like yelling, "I play piano, not computer!"

I waver between wishing it could all be written from top down and wishing it could all be pre-set, when really it does a little of both, which is the only way it can work, at least when you have playback. Without playback (as Crescendo does it) is a different situation entirely. After I get proficient at MuseScore, maybe I'll take another stab at a certain program created by some funny English guys, who have a different approach, which presently looks too complicated to me, but has some interesting aspects, and some different handy keystrokes.