At any rate, my favorite tips for AutoCAD are almost always short and sweet, so, I'm going to post them here in little bite-sized chunks.
Selection
Selection
There are a few different ways to go about selecting
entities to examine or modify, depending on your specific needs at the time. If
you were to select every single entity in a drawing, when you bring up the
Properties palette, you notice that some properties are not available for
editing. That is because different entity types do not all have the same
properties. You have to filter out dissimilar entities, so that you can access
the controls you need. The following paragraphs contain four different ways of creating
selection sets, select your favorite!
One of the easier ways to get a group of objects together
for mass editing would be through the Isolate
command, available on the Layers panel of the Home tab. You select an object or
objects on the layers you want to see, and this command will hide the remainder
of the layers for you. You can also start and reverse the command by typing in
LAYISO and LAYUNISO.
A more precise method for selecting objects is Quick Select. You can find this command
on your right-click menu, on the top of the Properties palette, or by typing
QSELECT. In the command’s dialog box, you see that you’ve got a couple more
options to get more specific in your object selection. You can control what
portion of your drawing the selection will draw from, which types of entities
are included in your selection set, which properties the desired objects have,
and what values you want to include or exclude. Say, I want to grab all Polyline
entities whose layer color is <> not equal to BYLAYER. I might not want
to grab all entities in the drawing and set them all to bylayer, because I
might have some annotation in the drawing that needs to remain a distinct color
for some temporary reason. Or, perhaps I want to grab all Text on layer
A-Rm-Num that is less than 9” tall, I can quickly and easily do that here.
If you use the Filter
command, bringing up the Object Selection Filters dialog, you see how precise
you can be in selecting objects, and you can even save the filter criteria for
future use.
Another, more recent, addition is the Select Similar command. It has been
available in vertical products for many years, and I was thrilled when it was
finally added to vanilla AutoCAD. If
you’re using release 2010 or earlier, you can find lisp routines which will
provide this functionality. There is code available in the forums and on myMistress of the Dorkness blog, along with instructions on adding it to your
right-click menu. I like the way it works, being a part of your shortcut
menu, because you don’t have to interrupt your workflow by using a dialog box or
moving out of the drawing area to click a button. Type SELECTSIMILAR then SE to
access the Select Similar Settings dialog box and dictate which criteria you
prefer to gather your selection by.
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