Selecting

For many options in Slide2 you are required to select entities on the screen, for example:

• Boundaries and vertices (e.g. deleting, moving)
• Loads (e.g. deleting)
• Support (e.g. deleting, assigning properties)
• Other entities such as grids focus objects etc (e.g. deleting, moving)

Here are some useful tips to remember when selecting.

General Rules

1. When an entity is selected, it will temporarily change colour or line style, to indicate that it is selected. For example, boundaries change to dashed red lines when selected.
2. IMPORTANT!!! Selection works as a toggle. That is, whenever an entity is selected, it can be de-selected by simply re-selecting it with the left mouse button, or with a selection window. This is useful any time that you select an entity by accident, that you did not intend to select.

Selecting with a Window

Entities can be selected by drawing a rectangular window around them with the mouse. This is useful for selecting multiple entities. When selecting entities with a window, there are two modes available:

1. Regular WINDOW mode, which requires that entities must be COMPLETELY within the window to be selected.
2. CROSSING window mode, which will select entities within or crossing the window (not applicable to vertices, see note below).

The two window modes can be accessed with the right mouse button. You will find the two window selecting modes to be useful in different situations, experiment with them to see how they work.

Selecting All Entities

To select ALL entities of a given type, draw a selection window (see above) around all entities to be selected.

Selection Filter

The Selection Filter allows the user to choose which boundary types can be selected for editing. By default, all boundaries are selectable. The main purpose of the Selection Filter is to allow the user to select boundaries with a window but filter out the selecting of some boundary types which may be within the window. See the Selection Filter topic for more information.