Decrease stretch

The decrease stretch command works in very small increments. Just keep applying it again and again until you get there. The keyboard shortcut is {.

It should be a noticeable change even aftet a single press, though. Which is tp say, what you described doing should and normally does work. Please post the score ypu are having problems wirh and precise steps to reproduce the problem. Could be something else going on; hard to say without looking at the actual score.

I have never bothered using the drop-down menu 'Decrease Stretch' command under LAYOUT. It's much easier to simply type the shortcut key, which is {.

As Marc said, you should see movement of the notes and rests in the selected measures on the first press or two of the { key. If you don't, you may have the keyboard set to a different layout and aren't pressing { at all, but something else.

On the physical keyboard, the { key is the one immediately to the right of the letter p, and you have to shift to get { instead of [. But if you're not using the standard U.S. keyboard layout with English (any version of it) as the input language, that physical key won't generate the code for that character, so MuseScore won't recognise it as the shortcut for 'decrease stretch.'

To change keyboards if you don't have the language bar showing in the Task Bar (this works for Windows XP and Win7; I am not sure about Win8 but it's probably similar): If you don't have the Language and Keyboard icons showing in the Taskbar, push the Windows button, click on CONTROL PANEL, then open the Region and Language menu. Click the Keyboards and Languages tab, and click Change Languages.... Choose a language as your default input language, and then double-click it in the window below to see the keyboard layout which goes with it. Note--you CAN use different keyboard layouts with a language.

EDIT TO ADD: I just saw your final comment, that this is the last measure of a line on which you have added a line-break. Check your settings under STYLE>General>PAGE>Last system fill threshold (30% is the default setting). If the contents of that line fill beyond the specified threshold , MuseScore will expand them to fill the line. To adjust the spacing of notes in that last measure, you might have to use the Inspector (F8) to move notes horizontally. You can do this by selecting each note you want to move in turn, and then clicking on the horizontal offset until it's where you want it. The increments are very small, so you can get a fine adjustment. It might be simpler, though, to ADD more stretch to the lines above that last line, so it fills out properly.

I went to page settings and changed the width to fit the last measures notes. Incase anyone else is still looking for an answer maybe this will help :)