Object Selection – Part 2

there’s another selection method that I want to talk about it’s really cool it’s called select similar everything in this file is exactly the same so I want to open up a different file for you.

let’s open up the mechanical example dash imperial DWG file for this chapter browse to it and open it up this is just a simple flywheel it’s a 2d drawing and it has three different orthogonal views in it here’s the front of it you can see the shaft opening with the key some notches some mounting holes etc here is a cross-sectional view of that from the side and one of the top
now you can see here in our selection because we have our selection cycling on that there are more than one objects here part of that is because I’m hovering right over these two lines this line and this line so i can pick it and it tells me line line they’re both blue sometimes it’s hard to tell which one it is but as you move over in your
selection cycling AutoCAD will highlight the line or the object that you want to pick if neither of these are correct you select none and I won’t pick anything so selection cycling can be very useful but let’s say I want to change all of these little circles here I can go through one at a time
the ones I want
or
all the same in my file I can select it and then right-click and use the Select similar option now picked all of the circles there on my object layer that includes this big one why don’t want to change that so I’m going to remove it I held the shift key down and selected the circle so that was much easier than going through and picking each one of these using any of my methods that I want and why you go and select your objects you can use your scroll wheel in the middle of your mouse to pan around that was a lot more difficult but once I do that I can start the erase command and erase all of them or move them or copy them whatever I would like to do I can also select this center line that’s a circle right click and select similar and as you see here there are
their circles on that layer but if I pick this line here select similar there are quite a few lines on the center layer now you can change the select similar criteria takes a couple of steps to get to it but you have to type in the command
select similar and now you type in se4 settings press enter now you’re going to select objects based on these criteria you can pick any of these and typically this is what you’re going to want name is the type of object so when we pick these little circles it was looking for an object called circle well that’s all of these here that’s this big one that’s the center line here those are all circle objects but the other criteria was layer so look for all the circles on the same layer that the one is that you originally picked so that’s a very useful you can pick line type line type scale line weight plot style object style or color you can add that to these but typically layer and name are the ones you’re going to want and these are the default settings but if you just want to pick everything that’s on one layer can turn name off click OK and select an object press Enter everything that’s on that layer has been picked that’s a great way to clean up a layer remember though AutoCAD is going to keep the criteria however it was you used at last so make sure that if you do something special it’s a one-time thing you might want to make the effort to go back and put it the way it needs to be and there you go AutoCAD gives you several different ways to select objects remember some of those whenever you go to start you have your crossing window in your selection window you’ll use those most often plus you can pick an object one at a time you have the fence command you have the select similar you also have your window polygon the wp or the crossing window polygon which is CP and you have your Shift key which you can use to unselect things this will save you a lot of time and effort through your drawing process