From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

Selecting objects - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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Selecting objects

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- [Narrator] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD Essentials course, and we're going to have a little look now at modifying objects. Now there's lots of videos to cover in this particular chapter, lots of different commands, and you will use them on a regular basis to modify and edit your AutoCAD drawings. So, we've got a new drawing for you, it's called ModifyingObjects.dwg, and as usual you can download it from the website and use it to follow along with all of the videos in this chapter. Now the first thing we're going to look at is selecting objects in AutoCAD. Now the good thing is, we've got a nice named view that we can go to, so I'm going to go to top here, like so, and I'm going to go to custom model views, and I'm going to select furniture. And that zooms me in to where the furniture is in the center of the floor plan there. Now, you can go and click on any object you want to in an AutoCAD drawing, so if I click on my grand piano, you can see I can select it, it's a block, it's got the one grip, I can click on the grip, and I can then move it around using the grip if I want to. I hit escape a couple of times, once to obviously cancel any command, and then hit escape a second time to deselect it like so. Now if I select a group of objects, and click on say, three or four objects, like so, just putting the crosshair on each one, what I can also do, if I want to deselect one of those objects, is hold down the shift key and click on the object I want to deselect from the selection set. I hit escape to deselect all the objects. Now there are some other methods of selecting objects as well. You can use a window crossing selection, and just a crossing selection. So if I use a window selection, I click, drag the window over the objects I want to select. Now you'll notice, that that table there only selects when the window is going all the way around it. So a window selection from left to right, has to have a boundary around all of the objects you want to select. So when I click on that second point of the window selection, it selects the objects. If I'd only crossed that table, it would not have selected the table. I'll hit escape now to deselect. If I go the opposite way, right to left, if I click now and drag the window like so, can you see, everything I cross gets selected, but everything inside the window gets selected as well. So when I click on that second point, you'll notice that the grid line, that I've crossed as well, is also selected. I might not want to select that, so I hold down shift, click on the grid line, and that deselects it from the selection set as well. So I'll just hit escape there to deselect. Now, there are two other quick methods that I just want to go through with you here, I'm just going to pan and zoom a little bit on this little group of furniture here. So you can see I've got a chair, a desk, nice little rubber plant, and also what looks like a table and chairs. Now, I'm going to use the erase command, which is up on the modify panel on the home tab on the ribbon. And I am going to use the icon in the modify panel here, I want to click on the command first, because then it gives me the select objects prompt. Now, there's two other quick methods that you can utilize for selection. And one of them is a window polygon, and the other one is a crossing polygon. So if I type wp, for window polygon, and enter, it asks for the first polygon point or pick or drag the cursor. So what I can do now, is I can now be a lot more accurate and go around the objects, and if I'm working in a really busy drawing, this is really useful, because I can pick as many points as I like to create the boundary of that polygon. Now I don't want the chair selected, so I press enter, it selects the objects inside the window polygon, and they have to be inside the boundary, like the window crossing selection, and I press enter again, and it erases them like so. I go up to undo on the quick access toolbar just to bring them back. Let's do that again, let's do erase, and this time we'll type cp, for crossing polygon, and enter. Now this time, all I've got to do is cross them. I don't have to have them enclosed by the window polygon itself. So, window polygon, you go around, and everything has to be inside the boundary, a crossing window polygon, you can do this kind of thing. So as I just go through the objects like that, they're selected, they don't have to be inside the crossing selection. So I press enter to confirm the selection, enter again to finish the erase, and job done. Exactly the same end result, but two different methods of doing it. So I'll just undo that to bring the furniture back, I'll go back to the top view here, and custom model views, and furniture again like so. So that's selecting your objects using various methods, either by clicking on them, or using crossing, or window selections, or the crossing polygon or the window polygon selection.

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