CAD Supervisor Eric Hudak tells us how he uses the filtering feature in AutoCAD's Quick Select tool to simplify his object selection process.
"Introduced with AutoCAD 2000, Quick Select is a powerful tool that helps you make complex object selections quickly. It allows you to create a selection set based on filtering criteria. Open the Quick Select dialog box using the QSelect command (or navigate to Tools menu > Quick Select). From this dialog box, you can specify the objects the filter will affect, the type of object you want to find, and the property and value for the filter. You can filter selection sets by property such as color, layer, linetype, etc.
"As an example, let's say you have several lines in a drawing that have Dashed as the linetype, but you want all lines to be ByLayer. Run Quick Select and under Object Type, select Line, then Linetype under Properties, and Dashed under Value. Then click OK. All lines with Dashed as the linetype will be selected. Finally, under Properties select ByLayer for Linetype to change the selected lines to ByLayer."
Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: Quick Select is a great selection tool. As the tipster states, it can be used to filter object selections. You can narrow down your selection by removing types of objects or objects with specific object traits. Typically you'll pick a certain criteria of object type and object trait, or remove objects based on type and trait for your selection — whichever fits your needs.