Chapter 10: Get a Grip on Object Selection 203

It’s all too easy to draw objects on top of other objects, and after they’re there, pretty well impossible to recognize that there are multiples so you can weed out the ones you don’t want. For some earlier releases, holding down the Shift key and the spacebar together while clicking suspected multiple objects will highlight them, one after the other; when the one you’re after lights up, you press Enter to select it. AutoCAD 2011 introduced a more powerful selection cycling method. With Selection Cycling enabled on the status bar, AutoCAD displays a blue overlapping rectangles icon if it detects multiple objects under your crosshairs. When you pick an object with this icon displayed, AutoCAD opens a Selection dialog box where you can choose the object you actually want.

Duplicate overlapping objects can be a real nuisance, but fortunately AutoCAD can find those duplicates and blow them away for you! Click the Delete Duplicate Objects tool (look for the broom on the Modify panel slideout on the Home tab) to run the aptly named OVERKILL command.

OVERKILL can delete all but one of any number of identical overlapping objects, it can join overlapping collinear line segments into a single line, and it can join concentric overlapping arc segments into a single arc. Better yet, if the combined arc segments cover a range equal to or greater than 360 degrees, it turns them into a circle.

You can clean up an entire drawing at one fell swoop by entering ALL at the

Select Objects prompt.

When you complete the object selection process, the Delete Duplicate Objects dialog box appears; there you can set a number of properties and options (see Figure 10-6). Check the online help for more about this command.

For some strange reason, the tool button we describe in the preceding paragraph may not have made it onto LT’s Modify panel. However, you do have access to the command — you just need to type OVERKILL at the command prompt to call up the Delete Duplicate Objects dialog box.

AutoCAD Groupies

AutoCAD lets you select a bunch of objects and gather them into a group, so that when you click one object, everything in the group is selected. You simply select your objects and click Group on the Groups panel of the Home tab. If you want, you can name your group as you create it. The buttons on the main Groups panel let you create new groups, toggle group selection off

and on, edit groups by adding or removing individual objects, or permanently ungroup a selected group.

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204 Part II: Let There Be Lines

Figure 10-6: Weed out those duplicate objects.

Object Selection: Now You See It . . .

The many object-selection modes we describe in previous sections — and some we don’t describe at all, such as the FILTER command (check out the online help system for more on that) — are useful as far as they go.

AutoCAD lets you control the visibility of individual objects. This may or may not sound like a big deal, but believe me, it is. Before AutoCAD 2011, the only way to control the display of objects was to turn off or freeze the layer on which they resided. If there were other objects on that layer that you did want to see . . . too bad! Three commands turn that limitation into ancient history:

HIDEOBJECTS: Prompts you to select those objects you want to make temporarily disappear.

ISOLATEOBJECTS: Prompts you to select those objects you want to see while temporarily making everything else disappear.

UNISOLATEOBJECTS: Ends the hiding and isolating of objects.

The primary method of invoking these commands is via the right-click menu. Using either command-first or selection-first editing (as described in the section “Commanding and Selecting,” earlier in this chapter), simply right-click

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