Setting Selection Preferences

There are two basic ways to make selections: one is to click an element directly, and the other is to enclose all or part of an element with a selection outline. You can set preferences to gain more control over these two methods. For the click method, you choose whether you must Shift-click to select multiple items or whether you can merely click additional items to add to a selection. For the selection-outline method, you decide if the outline must fully enclose a drawing-object to select it or if enclosing any part of a drawing-object selects the whole thing.

To set selection methods for the selection tools

1.	From the Edit menu (Windows) or the Flash application menu (Mac), choose Preferences. The Preferences dialog appears.
2.	From the Category list, choose General (Figure 4.1). Figure 4.1. Select General in the Category list of the Preferences dialog to choose a selection method.
3.	In the Selection section, choose either of the following check boxes: Shift Select. In Shift Select mode (Flash's default setting), you must Shift-click to add items to the current selection. With Shift Select turned off, each new item you click with the selection tool is added to the current selection. Contact-sensitive selection and lasso tools. With contact-sensitive selection turned on (the default mode), whenever a selection outline touches a drawing-object, a text field (see Chapter 3), a grouped shape (see Chapter 5), or a symbol instance (see Chapter 7), Flash selects the whole thing. This setting has no effect on merge-shapes; a selection outline always defines the precise area of the merge-shape that is selected (see the next section, "Making Selections").
4.	Click OK.