by Dennis Collin
Fig. AutoCAD’s grouping commands can be easily accessed from a right-click menu.
I must confess I do not really use groups in AutoCAD, partly because until recently the group commands were limited in functionality, to access and awkward to use. However, this changed a few versions ago with the commands being improved, making the grouping elements much easier. Object grouping is very useful when working on complex drawings where a range of objects need to be repeatedly selected and modified. In the image above furniture and equipment can be grouped together to make selection easier, and ungrouped when desired with an easy to access right click menu.
Fig. Group commands are available on the ribbon too!
The group commands can also be accessed via the ribbon menu on the Home tab. However, some of the editing options are still command line based. The Group Manager add-in extends the out of the box commands with some extra enhancements and dialogue box-based editing environment to make the editing and management of groups even easier!
Fig. To rename a group simply double click in the appropriate cell.
The Manager command accessed from the add-ins tab provides an easy-to-use table interface. The tools include unique group creation, reordering objects in a group, find groups by object selection, variable toggle and backup and restore group options to elements in other drawings. There is also a purge empty group command to delete groups that have no objects in them.
The Group Manager add-in is free to download off the Autodesk App store and can be downloaded and installed from here:
https://apps.autodesk.com/ACD/en/Detail/Index?id=9134996819809450598&appLang=en&os=Win32_64
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