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A Practical Way of Selecting Entities: QUICKSELECT

2 Comments Mar-27-2009 | Posted by Erhan Toker | Printable Version | Level |

In very crowded drawings, sometimes gets hard to select some specific entities. For example, selecting all of the beds in a hospital drawing, selecting all of the spillways in a dam drawing, or as you will see in the example given here, selecting all of the cabinets on the bottom.

Fig. 1.

For selecting entities, our best helper is layers without any doubt. In layouts, which are drawn with a good layering discipline, it will be very easy to make quick selects ( QSELECT ). Let’s quickly examine the command:

( Alternative : Symbol on the upper right side of the Properties panel. Fig. 2 )

Fig. 2.

After the command is entered, window in Fig. 1 is opened up. Now, let’s examine the controls inside the inside the window from top to down:

Apply to: Entire drawing it filters the whole drawing. You can also choose to mark a certain location and make selection in this location by the help of small button near it.
Object type: Here you can determine which type of drawing entities to be selected. Due to the fact that all of the kitchen cabinets in our drawing are blocks, we are choosing Block Reference type from here. For the example of dam, this may be LINE, PLINE or SPLINE.
Properties: From here, we are selecting which properties of the entities to be filtered. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, if we are using a good layering systematic then making the selection according to the Layer property seems more appropriate.

Fig. 3.

Operator: In this part, the logical operations are listed as ( <> Not equal ), ( = Equals ), ( <> Not equal ) or ( Select all ). Due to the fact that, most of the time we are looking for a specific entity, we use the equal option here.
Value: And here, we write the value that we are looking for. As the cabinets on the bottom are in TAL_3D_BOTTOM layer, I have selected the name of this layer from the list ( Fig. 3). If you repeat the example according to yourself, you will notice that you are limited only to the types of entities which are present in the drawing. By this way, selection process is simplified. It is given on the part below, how your selection will be.
How to apply: Include new selection set, it creates a totally new selection set. And Exclude from new selection set extracts the entities among the selected ones that fits these settings.
Append to current selection set: This property appends the selection that you have made with these settings to the entities already selected on the screen. By using this property, you can make multiple selections one after another and append to each other.

Have ease everyone.

Related Articles:

• Selecting overlapping entities
• Making selection in AutoCAD

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