AutoCAD Tip: Selection Manager - a useful add-in to save and recall previous selection sets

By Dennis Collin

When working with AutoCAD drawings a lot of time is spent selecting objects. There are lots of ways of selecting objects with selection polygons, lassos, previous, fence and all are all very useful. However, the objects selected with these tools cannot be easily recalled, unless using a facility like Groups. Luckily, AutoCAD has a large community of developers who create add-in applications to fill this gap and add extra functionality to the software.

Selection Manager is an AutoCAD application that makes it easy to save and restore objects that you have selected in your drawing. Selection manager can be used to quickly save and restore the selection set. Selection sets are saved in the drawing and can be used by anyone with the Selection Manager interface.

To create a selection set, select the objects via normal means and then run Selection Manager, it will list the new set as ‘Selectionset1’ or similar. This set can be renamed to a more suitable description and can be recalled at a later point in time.

To access a selection set, click on the ribbon button or type SMANG, select the desired selection set, click Zoom, OK and the elements will be selected and listed in the property’s palette. These selection sets can be modified, with elements later added or removed from a set or even deleted from a drawing entirely.

Selection Manager will help when working with sets of elements repeatedly and will mean that results from using the Qselect or Filter commands can be recalled quickly.

The Selection Manager application is free to use and can be downloaded from the App store here:

https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=1240322250933383493&appLang=en&os=Win32_64

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