The twelve lavender/blue buttons at the bottom of the screen are context sensitive to what you are doing such that at any stage of operation, you are presented with a dozen or less choices.
When a dialog box is open, the LEDs show you what buttons are used to jump to specific controls (lists, check boxes etc.). The LED will blink showing you what control currently has focus.
For instance, if the Record Cue dialog box was open, the softkeys would be as follows:
Note:
The sofkeys S1 through S12 on the console are mapped to F1 through F12 on the QWERTY keyboard.
If you are selecting from a combo list (similar to [S1] above), you can either repeatedly press the softkey to change the selection or you can double press [S1] to get a pop up list:
When you get this list, [S1] through [S4] become:
You can also use the Softkeys, Arrow Keys or the Wheel to select the desired choice. Once you have highlighted the right one, press [ENTER].
Some dialog boxes, such as the Record dialog box, have buttons that
have the [+] symbol after the text, like this: 
. Pressing and holding the [SHIFT]
key gives you additional softkeys, such as the following:
In this case, pressing any of these softkeys changes the attribute masking without the need to open the Attribute dialog box.
Note:
While holding down [SHIFT], the other softkey accelerators in the dialog box will disappear (i.e., [S2] Cue List just becomes Cue List). Although it may look odd when entering labels that include capital letters, it does not prevent you from utilizing other shifted functions such as holding down SHIFT and rolling the wheel to change numerical fields by 0.1 rather than whole numbers.
If you double press any of [S4] through[S11] you can solo that attribute family. This is quicker than pressing [S2] then reselecting the single desired one.
If your show has moving lights patched, as you select fixtures, the softkeys will change to give you direct access to the moving light attributes:
For more information on manipulating moving light attributes, check out the topic Controlling Moving Lights.
When no dialog boxes are open and you have no moving lights selected, you can use your mouse to press the softkey buttons. The default softkeys give additional functionality that is not available with the hard buttons on the console:
If you want to access the Default Softkeys while moving lights are selected, rather than releasing the fixtures, just press backspace. The attributes will remain captured, but the selection will clear and you can then see the Default Softkeys.
If the Command Line starts with [CUE], the softkeys change to:
This allows you more traditional manipulation of existing cues (if you terminate the command line with [ENTER]) or allows you to specify some attributes of the cue before you record them (terminating the command line with [REC]).
See Also: