Quick select objects by Color or by any other object property in that matter, is a crucial knowledge that every AutoCAD drafter needs to know. The inspiration to write this came from a colleague of mine. She had to select all text objects in a drawing and insulate the red ones. Red Text also needed to be in a specific layer, not just any red text.
So let’s get her task as an example. First, we will Quick Select all the text in the C-Points layer, and then we will select text by Color. To do this we will go through the following steps:
- Firstly, we select a text object that is in the layer our red text is.
- Secondly, we right-click and pick Select Similar. To select all text objects in the selected text’s layer.
- The next task is to Quickly Select objects by Color.
Again a right-click of the mouse, however, this time we pick Quick Select. - A new window will pop up called Quick Select. To select only Red Text objects of the currently selected we will need to apply the following options.
- Apply To: Current Section is ok for us.
- Object Type: Mtext – if you have selected more object types it will show Multiple, we need to change it back to Mtext (or Text depending on the objects we are using)
- Properties: Color – We leave it to Color as the task is to Quick Select only Red Color text. If we want we can use another property, like Layer, Linetype, etc.
- Operator: Equals – we leave it as it is. We need all that is equal to the settings we are setting up.
- Value: Red this will remain as is, for the current example.
- How To Apply: Include in new selection set – we leave it to Include for the given example. Sometimes it is useful to choose Exclude too.
- Append to current section set. If Append to Current Selection Set is selected, the filtering criteria is applied to the entire drawing, we leave it as it is.
- Hit Enter!
That’s it. The Easiest way to quickly Select Text by Color.
Note: You can Skip step 2 if we check Append to Current Selection Set, however, I prefer to leave it unchecked as I tend to forget about it sometimes and it troubles me.
Hope you the advice useful!
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