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Making Property Selection Filters in AutoCAD

It has always been a pleasure to publish a guest post from someone in the Autodesk community. It helps the guest author get more visibility among peers as well as shares some valuable knowledge with the readers of this Between the Lines blog, a win – win for everyone.

This guest post is by Jaiprakash Pandey - blog www.thesourcecad.com. Jaiprakash is a Mechanical Engineer, Blogger, and Corporate trainer.

Lets Explore the Power of Quick Select!

When you have a large drawing to work it becomes necessary that you act smart in order to remain productive and reduce your drawing edit time there are many tools in AutoCAD which will help you in becoming more productive and efficient one such tool is Quick Select which can be used not only for making selection filters but it can also be used to count number of objects of a particular type in AutoCAD.

To explain this tool I will use this sample drawing you can download this sample drawing from here.

Property Selection Filter Drawing Sample

As you can see that the drawing is very messy and cluttered with lots of circles of different radius, Dimensions, Rectangles and layers I will make a filter based upon properties assigned to this drawing let’s start with situation where we want to select all circles with a particular radius.

Go to Quick select tool on home ribbon> Utilities panel> Quick select
Or You can type Qselect or Count in command bar to invoke this tool.

In the first option you will be asked to provide the drawing from where you want to make filter select entire drawing from drop down menu ( you can also select drawing area by picking select objects tool on the right of drop down menu)

In object type selection box you will find list of all objects present in your drawing and by default Multiple is selected in drop down menu which indicates that filter is created from the entire object types, select circle from drop down menu because we need a filter related circles only.

Once you make your selection in object type selection menu the options in Properties box will change to reflect all the properties associated with circle select the property which you want to apply to your filter like in this case we need to select radius for making filter.

Now the next option is operator which will help you in selecting specific property related with your selection for example if you are looking for all circles with radius equal to 2.5 select equal in operator (=) and specify 2.5 in Value box, if you are looking for all circles with radius larger than 2.5 then select greater than (>) operator, if you want to select all circles then select All in the operator drop down menu and all circles will be selected.

Next you will find ‘how to Apply’ option select ‘include in new selection set’ radio button if you want to select the objects assigned current filter and select ‘Exclude from new selection set’ if you want to select remaining objects but not the objects of current filter, Refer image below if you miss anything.

clip_image004

Click on Append to current selection set if you have already selected some objects before invoking Qselect command and want to include them in your current filter.

A similar analogy can be used to make filters based upon different properties like layers, linetype, linetype scale, color etc. once you make selection in properties box all the corresponding options change to reflect only relevant values and this make your task even easier.

Counting objects Using Qselect:

You can even use this command to count number of objects in a drawing using this command, as an example if you want to count all the circles with radius 2.5 units follow the above procedure and select equal operator and enter value 2.5 and hit ok all the circles with radius 2.5 will be selected also you will find 25 objects selected appear above command box which indicates number of selected objects, refer image below. To count all circles enter zero in the value box of radius!

Commandline with selected indicated

Thank you Jaiprakash! – Shaan

If you have read this Between the Lines blog over 12 years you know I am a big believer in promoting other blogs and product users tips and tricks as they say a rising tide floats all boats as it benefits all of us, and the of course you the readers. It has always been a real pleasure to publish a guest post from someone in the community to the community.

The idea is to share tips and articles that benefit Autodesk product and technology users as well as promote you, the expert and your, consulting, books, looking for a job, or promoting your blog, Twitter handle, or raise your Autodesk street cred among the CAD peeps. It helps the guest author get more visibility among peers as well as shares some valuable knowledge with the readers of the Between the Lines blog, a win – win for everyone in my book.

Share the knowledge as I don’t know everything and many bloggers are really knowledgeable on Autodesk products and technologies. You don’t need to be a blogger, just have some knowledge to share with the readers.

If you would like to publish a guest article on this blog about Autodesk Products, Tips and Tricks, or Autodesk Technology from 3ds  Max, AutoCAD, Inventor, Fusion 360, 123D products and of course Revit really just and all things Autodesk.

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Cheers,
Shaan

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