Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

Select all options...

Anonymous
Not applicable
Hello everyone

Been learning Archicad 12 for the better part of 6 months now, been coming along well but there is one thing that has really been annoying me and thats the ability to select things.

Where [Ctl + A] will select all objects, and [Ctl + A] with say the roof or the wall tool selected will select all roofs or walls respectively, I was really hoping there would be an ability to do a little more than just this. In particular, the ability to select all of a particular composite type.

Say I have an entire structure with masonry wall exterior and timber framed internals, and on the same layer combination, an aluminium shed. In this case, selecting the wall tool then performing Ctl + A is next to useless, as having to manually de-select all the collaterally selected walls is a nightmare and you always end up either de-selecting a few of the walls you wanted in the first place, or missing by a fraction and selecting slabs and other nearby objects.

The worst part is, having to hold down shift during complex selections in addition to having to use the tab trick just to select the desired object in a stack of overlapping objects seems to be beyond the capacity for my manual dexterity and it is not unknown for it to take me upwards of 20 attempts just to get all the walls of a particular type selected so that I may do something so simple as to alter their color or height.

There has to be a simpler way to do this, other than pre-assign all my walls and objects to a complicated hierarchy of layers and layer combinations, or retrospectively assigning them ones just to be able to select them.

Is there a way to select all based on composite type, or based on assigned input data? This would really make my life a lot easier.

Thanks.
5 REPLIES 5
Anonymous
Not applicable
goto- edit> find and select.

then play around with that, you can change the items you want to select and add to the list.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Yes....go with Find in Edit Menu
Cheers,
Anonymous
Not applicable
Or Ctrl+F is a nice and easy shortcut!
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Notice that there is a little triangular fly-out menu at the top right of the dialog. (You will find these in many places within ArchiCAD - easy to miss.)

If you set up a complicated find query, you can save it for later re-use. While a nice feature, I've never had a need to save a query myself, as I usually eyedropper something similar to what I want (or select it) and then fine tune the settings from there.

Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
Peter wrote:
Or Ctrl+F is a nice and easy shortcut!
haha! I just read your comment and wondered why on earth you would repeat what was stated twice already, until I realised that Ctl + F was nowhere mentioned in the two preceding replies. Somehow I must have gone into archicad and just hit ctl + f instinctively! 15 years of PC use will do that I suppose. Now, if only Alt + Enter worked too...

thanks for the responses guys, this more or less solves all my problems. Cheers.