Finding the Layers You Want

With only a handful of layers, it's fairly easy to find the layer you want to turn off. It becomes much more difficult, however, when the number of layers exceeds 20 or 30. The Layer Properties Manager dialog box lets you control the list of layers in the same way that you can control filenames in Windows Explorer.

Suppose you have several layers whose names begin with C, such as C-lights, C-header, and C-pattern, and you want to find those layers quickly to turn them off. You can click the Name button at the top of the layer list to sort the layer names in alphabetic order. (You can click the Name button again to reverse the order.) To select those layers for processing, click the first layer name that starts with C; then scroll down the list until you find the last layer of the group, and Shift+click it. All the layers between those layers are selected. You can then turn all the selected layers off by clicking one of the lightbulb icons of the selected group of layers.

To deselect some of those selected layers, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the layer names you don't want to include in your selection. Or Ctrl+click other layer names you do want selected.

The Color and Linetype buttons at the top of the list let you sort the layer list by color or linetype assignments. Other buttons sort the list by virtue of the status: On/Off, Freeze/Thaw, Lock/Unlock, and so forth.

You can quickly select all the layers in the list by right-clicking the Layer Properties Manager dialog box and then choosing Select All. You can also choose Clear All to clear any selections. Select All But Current and Invert Selections do just what they say.

In the previous example, you turned off a set of layers with a single click of a lightbulb icon. You can freeze/thaw, lock/unlock, or change the color of a group of layers in a similar manner by clicking the appropriate layer property. For example, clicking a color swatch of one of the selected layers opens the Select Color dialog box, in which you can set the color for all the selected layers.