Quick Select or Qselect is one powerful yet often underutilized autocad shortcut tip that can highly improve your productivity.
Often, we find ourselves needing to modify multiple instances of similar objects within a drawing. Manually selecting these items can be painfully slow and prone to errors. Enter ‘Quick Select’ or QSELECT, an incredibly efficient tool that swiftly becomes indispensable once integrated into your workflow.
Here’s How It Works:
- Accessing Quick Select:
- You can access Quick Select in two ways:
- Via command line: Simply type
QSELECTand press enter. - Through right-click context menu: Right-click anywhere in your drawing space, navigate through the menu and click on ‘Quick Select’.
- Via command line: Simply type
- Setting Criteria:
After invoking QSelect, a dialog box appears allowing you to set various selection criteria:- Object Type: Choose from a wide array such as lines, circles, polylines etc.
- Properties: Further refine by properties like color, layer, linetype etc.
- Select whether you want all objects meeting the criteria or those that do not meet it (“Include” vs “Exclude”).
- Applying Conditions:
This is where QSelect shines—apply conditions such as equals (=), does not equal (!=), greater than (>), or less than (<) among others depending on property selected ensuring precise targeting specific elements need attention - Once settings are configured hit “OK”; immediately all entities matching specified filter will be selected ready manipulated however fit purpose speeding up tedious part project focusing creative aspects autonomy provided CAD software useungfullion capabilities
Practical Application Example:
This example below highlights how this simple command can significantly streamline workflow and improve efficiency in drafting projects.
Scenario: Cleaning Up an Architectural Drawing
Imagine you’re working on refining an architectural drawing for a large commercial project. The plan is populated with numerous text objects detailing dimensions, annotations, and notes. However, through various stages of editing and contributions from different team members, these text objects have ended up in several colors—making the drawing look inconsistent and potentially confusing for clients or contractors to follow.
Your task is now to standardize all text objects to a single color without manually selecting each one (a tedious endeavor in such a detailed drawing). Here’s where QSELECT becomes a game changer.
Steps Using QSELECT:
- Invoke QSELECT:
- Type
QSELECTinto AutoCAD’s command line and press Enter.
- Invoke QSELECT: Type
QSELECTinto AutoCAD’s command line and press Enter. - Configure Your Criteria In the ‘Quick Select’ dialog box that appears,
- Set ‘Object Type’ to Text if you aim only at standalone texts or MText for multiline texts.
- Under Properties, choose ‘Color’.
- For Condition select ‘=’, indicating equality.
- And finally for Value choose what specific color(s) you want to address; say Red (or its color number equivalent like 1)
- Perform Action:
- Once your criteria are set up hit OK. All text entities matching your search parameters will be automatically selected across the entire drawing.
- Change Color:
With all relevant text items selected thanks to Quick Select,
Right-click => select properties from context menu
Within properties palette under General>Color change current mismatched chosen standardized unified preference say ByLayer which good practice CAD drafting ensuring consistency ease future edits
With just those few quick steps—you’ve managed to unify disparate elements cohesively with minimal effort and time required.
He has recently started to adopt Revit in his architectural practice for 3D and BIM functionality.
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