MANAGE PROPERTIES

CHPROP
You can change the current properties for any object in your drawing in the following ways:

• Open the Properties (Double-click the objet) palette and view and change the settings for all properties of the object.
• View and change the settings in the Layer control on the Layers toolbar and the Color, Linetype, Lineweight, and Plot Style controls on the Properties toolbar.

The Properties palette lists the current settings for properties of the selected object or set of objects. You can modify any property that can be changed by specifying a new value.

• When more than one object is selected, the Properties palette displays only those properties common to all objects in the selection set.
• When no objects are selected, the Properties palette displays only the general properties of the current layer, the name of the plot style table attached to the layer, the view properties, and information about the UCS.

You can double-click most objects to open the Properties palette when the DBLCLKEDIT command is on (the default). The exceptions are blocks and attributes, hatches, gradient fills, text, multilines, and xrefs. If you double-click any of these objects, an object-specific dialog box displays instead of the Properties palette.

Exercise – Click on the outermost left vertical line of the structure to select it. In the Layer toolbar (First to the extreme left of the Object Properties Toolbar) it will show ‘0’. Click on it to open the dropdown list and click on ‘A-Line-Sec’. This will change the layer property of the selected line from ‘0’ to ‘A-Line-Sec’.

MATCHPROP
You can copy some or all properties of one object to other objects using Match Properties. The types of properties that can be copied include, but are not limited to, color, layer, linetype, linetype scale, lineweight, plot style, and 3D thickness.

By default, all applicable properties are automatically copied from the first object you selected to the other objects. If you don't want a specific property or properties to be copied, use the Settings option to suppress the copying of that property. You can choose the Settings option at any time during the command.

Exercise – Click on the ‘Match Properties’ Button on the Standard Toolbar next to the cut, copy, paste buttons that looks like a paintbrush. Select the same line whose layer is been changed from ‘0’ to ‘A-Line-Sec’ (source objects whose properties to be copied) and then select all other lines within the structure (destination objects whose properties needs to be matched with the source).

Till this point you must have figured out one thing that you need to make quite a no. of selections for selecting the objects for modifying. Wouldn’t it be great if we can have some easier, faster and customizable object selection options? And it would also save lot of our time and effort. Isn’t it? Well, you said it. From tomorrow we will explore this important aspect of Object Selection in AutoCAD to facilitate and accelerate our drafting process. Stay tuned…!