Selecting Elements

When you right-click on an object or a tag in Revit, one option is to Select All Instances. For some reason, even though it's in plain English, some users tend to think that only those instances in the current view will be selected. When Revit says "All", it means ALL! (in the entire project file)

So how do you select all instances within a view? It's a multi-step process, at least for right now.

1. First, do a Select All Instances on the object in question.
2. Now use the Isolate Elements command to only show the selected elements in your view.
3. Finally, window-select the visible objects in your view. The filter tool at the bottom-right corner of your view window should report the same amount of objects selected or less.

Doing a window-select on it's own does not give you enough filter granularity and will only show you the categories of the selected objects and the quantity of your selection. So if you have 20 types of casework, it'll show them all grouped under that category, which is not what we want to select. We want all instances of just one type selected.

Another little issue I ran across this past week...I wanted to select all instances of a type of casework and change an instance parameter. Once I selected all instances in a project, I noticed that the instance properties were greyed out. This happened because some of those instances lied within groups. To deselect the groups, I isolated all the selected instances in my view and hovered over the visible objects with my cursor. When a group was highlighted, I Shift+clicked to deselect it. Once all groups were removed from the selection, I was able to make the instance parameter changes. Later I edited the groups and made the same changes there too.

So, here are some suggestions to the Factory to make our lives easier:

• We need a "Select all instances in current view" option.
• We need the ability to expand the filter categories and reveal the different types in the selection. The filter tool has been enhanced in the 2009 versions, but has a way to go to be truly efficient.
• We need to be able to "Select all instances" on lines too!!
• We need the ability to easily remove elements that reside within groups from our selections. Currently, if you select instances that are within groups, those groups do not become part of the selection set. If they did, then perhaps it would be easier to remove them by going to the filter dialog and unchecking the"Detail Group" and/or "Model Group" categories, leaving only ungrouped instances selected.

I'm sure you have more enhancements in mind, so feel free to add your comments!

EDIT: Thanks a lot to "ada" (see comments) for pointing out that this technique doesn't work on dimensions. In fact, it doesn't work on any annotation object, since when you hide the referenced model element, the associated tag/dimension is hidden also. That should strengthen the argument for the need for a "Select all instances in View" command!

Selecting Elements

Adjusting stubborn Topography

This trick has a wide range of applications. I have used it before when we needed to move an entire wing of a building by some amount, but couldn't do it within the project because some elements with a vertical workplane prevented us from moving those objects with others horizontally.

In this case it was the opposite. We wanted to move topography vertically, but for some reason, we couldn't. Even if you choose a vertical workplane in a 3D view, topography will still try to move in a horizontal plane. You should be able to move it vertically in a section or elevation, but in our case it wouldn't budge. Also, topography doesn't host to levels, which would have come in really handy in this situation! The last thing we wanted was to edit each point individually or spend a lot of time troubleshooting. So here's what we did:

1. We selected all the elements we wanted to move vertically and grouped them.
2. We selected the group and made it into a link (keep your eye on the Options Bar).
3. Now we were able to move the linked file vertically. We then went in reverse...clicked the option to Bind this linked file (again, eye on the Options Bar).
4. Now it was turned back into a group, so the next step was to ungroup it and delete the unused group.

How many other situations will this technique come in handy to save you? NOTE: Watch out if you're using phasing as you might lose information if you have custom named phases.

Adjusting stubborn Topography