Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Select All Instances Tool Dangerous

I would recommend that all new users not use the Select All Instances tool. If the tool was 'Select All Instances in View', then fine but not as it is. Why? If you pick a piece of text in a drafting view and then use 'Select All Instances' all text of that type will be selected. If you then delete, it's all gone in every view. This holds true for walls, doors and everything.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I strongly concur!!!

Found this out the hard way on my first revit project...and the night before a deadline! I have no idea how I did it, but somehow I must have selected all instances of annotative text throughout the project, and deleted them! I didn’t pick up on the error until 8+ hours of saved wok later! Luckily I had not created/ edited too much text that day, and was able to copy the deleted text from a previous day’s backup file (but of course I couldn’t just “select all instances”, copy and paste…I had to go copy from each files view to view…a 3 hr detour). Revit places so many restrictions in each view, it’s completely unintuitive that selecting all instances of a 2d (annotative text) object would be applied globally! They really should clarify the command terminology by adding an “in project” at the end…or better yet, give us a secondary “select all instances in view” command.