Quick Select

Quick Select is one of my favorite tools, but from what I've seen, it's among the most under-used commands out there. In my opinion, it's the fastest way to populate a selection set of objects that share specific properties.

I've often used Quick Select as a method of checking drawing standards. It's happened that (more than once) I've been happily annotating a drawing, when I look up to discover that I had the wrong layer set current. Oops. The fix is simple, though, with Quick Select.

First, it helps to verbalize what you want to find. "I want to find all dimensions that are not on the DIMENSION layer." Then start Quick Select, choose "dimensions" as the object type, "layer" for the property, "not equal" as operator, and "DIMENSION" as the layer. See how each of those pieces came straight out of the sentence above? They're in a slightly different order, but all the information is there.

Click OK, and you're left with a selection set consisting of nothing but dimensions on all layers other than DIMENSION. Now all there is to do is put them on the right layer, and you're done.

That's just one example of how Quick Select works. The possibilities really are endless. You could select all polylines with an area less than 100 sq. ft., or lines with a length greater than 10, or blocks named LIGHT, or anything. You can even run Quick Select multiple times to add property filters. For instance, all circles with a diameter less than 5 whose color does not equal ByLayer. See?

Play around with Quick Select, and soon you'll wonder what you did without it!