Delete Duplicates

keeping your work area neat and tidy is very useful in AutoCAD that’s the idea behind the delete duplicates command it’s not really new or anything but it was fully installed into AutoCAD 2012 so that means in 2013 here that it’s going to work wonderfully it also means that it’s in AutoCAD LT the delete duplicates command is also known as the overkill command and it comes from the expressed tools pack the express tools pack were once extra tool sets that you had to purchase separately or additionally when you bought AutoCAD it did things in there that AutoCAD didn’t and they were really cool a lot of the features now over the years have been fully integrated natively into AutoCAD that’s a great for AutoCAD LT users because those commands are now a part of AutoCAD LT you see the Express Tools packet wouldn’t work with AutoCAD LT that was one of the downgrades that you had to go through in order to buy AutoCAD LT at a lesser price than AutoCAD but that’s ok so they overkill command will delete duplicate objects and I’ll merge some polylines together and get rid of messy line work it removes redundant geometry let’s open up a file
at the chapter 6 folder and take a look at the architectural annotation scaling and multileader
example file it’s a long title I know but it serves a lot of purposes this is a simple drawing it has several architectural and structural elevational views it’s a stairway you can see the stairs here the handrails some hallways doors windows etc and other various views of them well this is an older drawing and it has some issues in it it happens for example if you see this line right here
there are several lines that are there it happens things get copied but get borrowed they get moved and it builds up well how do you get rid of them if I select it
I don’t know which one of these they are this is the selection cycling that we’re seeing we talked about it in an earlier chapter if that gets in the way then you may want to just turn that off you can do that here on the status bar I come here I don’t know what I’m clicking
but if I use the list command which we’ll talk about another chapter it will tell you about the things that you’re selecting as you can see it found two items press Enter
there are two lines
they’re identical they have all the same attributes and properties about them well I can go through and delete them or erase them one at a time
so okay bring the last one back or I can use the overkill command just type in overkill
Center
then select the objects I want to check is just one line
I listed out select it Oh No there are two of them there
let’s erase one of them
listed out again type in Li for lists use your crossing window for selection you see there’s only one object there so that lines good let’s use the overkill Center
Tsing window and select all of these items there are a hundred 28 objects found there’s clearly not 128 there are several here but not a hundred 28 if I press ENTER I get this delete duplicate objects control box I can ignore objects by any of these properties
color layer line type etc so if I want to ignore everything that’s you know different colors or the same color I can tell AutoCAD to do that I can combine collinear objects which is a nice little trick they’ll make them into one object iri can you know maintain different associative objects which we’ll talk about later what those are and some of the things mostly it’s going to delete them and get rid of the objects that are duplicate click OK and there we go 63 duplicates delete it now I left this one here which was great if we list out again
there’s only one object here that’s fantastic and that’s essentially what it does it will ignore everything that’s unique and get rid of everything that’s a duplicate so if you get a drawing from someone else and you’re having issues with lines you’re trying to move them you’re trying to copy them and it’s just not working well that could be because of multiple objects
see these are still good here if we look down here
says one found okay one found who three found on that selection if you see right here tells you how many you selected with that pick and how many you have selected total so here I could go and delete one they’re still there delete another one it’s still there
delete another one okay that one’s good if I had to do that over and over again that would take forever and I would have no idea what I’ve been able to fix and what still needs fixing so if i zoom extents
overkill enter and I literally pick everything press Enter
okay
it found 156 duplicates and they were deleted and it found 98 overlapping objects
my drawing quite a bit
can be very useful it does a lot of things it keeps your line work clean and it reduces your file size so if you have to send a file to somebody via email or something then that will help that out too