Cadalyst - January/February 2009 - (Page 42) circlesandlines By Lynn Allen Capture the Perfect Selection Set in AutoCAD QSelect quickly gathers and counts your objects of choice. W e all know how to obtain a selection set of objects by manually selecting them onscreen. But what if you wanted a selection set of a certain type of object, such as text or a block? Or what if you wanted to take that one step further and wanted a selection set of all the text objects of a certain height or all the blocks with a certain name? Two commands allow you to filter objects by their properties: the ancient (but very powerful) Filter command and the newer (and friendlier) QSelect command. I’m going to focus on the low-stress QSelect command for this installment of “Circles and Lines,” but for those brave souls out there, feel free to take a look at the Filter command. The Filter command is nearly top secret nowadays; you won’t find it in any menus or toolbars, so you’ll have to key it in. QSelect (short for Quick Select) first entered the AutoCAD world through the Properties palette (figure 1). It is just as easy to access it directly from the Tools menu or by keying it in at the Command prompt. Unless I am missing something, this powerful tool does not reside in the AutoCAD 2009 ribbon. So let’s say I wanted to find all the blocks called Door in my drawing. Using QSelect, I can specify to search the entire drawing. Select Block Reference from the Object Type drop-down menu as well as Name from the list of block properties. I want to find all the blocks that have a name equal to Door, so I’ll select “=” as the operator, and, finally, I’ll use the Figure 1. Easily access QSelect from the Properties palette. drop-down menu to select the name Door. Figure 2 shows the selections needed to find all the Door blocks in an entire drawing. I want to include all the door blocks in a new selection set, so I will use the default and finally, an OK button will highlight all the door blocks as well as do a handy count — so powerful! Figure 2. QSelect makes it easy to filter specific objects in a drawing. At this point, I can enter the So what if you want to select all the appropriate editing command or use door blocks that have a rotation angle the Properties menu to make changes of 90 degrees? Unfortunately, QSelect to the selected objects. only lets you apply one filter at a time If you want QSelect to search a (unlike the more stellar Filter comspecific group of objects, as opposed mand). You can, however, re-enter the to an entire drawing, you can do so by manually picking the Select Objects QSelect command and apply a second button in the upper-right corner of the filter to the existing selection set. Just dialog box. You also can select objects make sure the Apply To option is set to Current Selection. You can repeat this first and then enter the command to process as many times as you need. get the same results. www.cadalyst.com cadalyst January/February 2009 42 http://www.cadalyst.com
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