Revit Basics: Select Previous

How do you select the previous object again?
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Sometimes the little tricks and shortcuts are what make your workflow really efficient. That applies also to the BIM workflow, and of course to using Revit. One of the things that you notice when you start using a new software is that your speed doing certain things goes way down compared to the "other" software you previously used (if you were proficient with that other software".

One of the things I missed when starting to use revit was the option I used many times in AutoCAD of Select Previous. That is in AutoCAD to select the last object you had selected by entering "p" + ENTER while you are promted to select objects. This very simple shortcut, made working with AutoCAD very fast. How to do it in Revit?

Revit has also a way to select the previous selected object. I found it through HOK BIM Solutions (well actually through Google) and it is as simple as pressin Ctrl + Left Arrow. It saves loads of time, specially with complicated models where finding an object amongst a "jungle" of objects might take a while.


My last words are to say, that the same way I googled for a solution to my inquiry, anyone can. Sometimes it might take 1 minute to find the solution, sometimes it might take more. But if you are going to use some piece of software for many years isn't it worth it to spend once in awhile time searching for the way to work faster? Believe it is, do not keep working slowly if you think there might be a way to do it better, there always is. Actually that is how this website started, trying to find ways to work faster and recording them into a blog to find them later easily.

Cheers

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AutoCAD: Disabling selection preview for Hatches

Do you get stuck in the selection preview of complex objects?A nice feature like the selection preview can become really annoying if we are working with dense hatch patterns.
What selection preview does is that it highlights the object we are going to select if we click the left mouse button. This works very nice and smooth with simple objects like lines, polylines, arcs, etc. It happens though that when we have a dense hatch, specially if it is a hatch made of dots it might take several seconds to show the selection preview due to the amount of objects in the hatch pattern.
Although we can turn off the selection preview turning the SELECTIONPREVIEW system variable to 0, what we actually want to do is to keep it on for some elements and off for some others like hatch patterns.
We have two options to do that.

1. Set the system variable PREVIEWFILTER to 16, this will only exclude hatch patterns from the selection previews.
2. Go to Format --> Options --> Selection Tab -->Visual Effects Options --> Advanced Options --> Uncheck the Box in front of Hatch Patterns.
   

See it in a couple of images for more detailed reference.









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