Selection Filters – two simple and GREAT keyboard filters

This is a big one folks if you don’t know about it yet – and many don’t! It’s a super-simple one. Keyboard selection filters. E for edge filter and X for face filter. It’s that simple. (There are many others, but typically these are the two most commonly used.)

Many SolidWorks users make use of these two simple keys dozens of times per day to save themselves a lot of time and a lot of frustration. How many times have you tried to pick a face but all you can get is an edge? You find yourself having to zoom in closer so that you can pick your face. Did you know that if you simply press the X key that you can’t accidentally pick an edge even if you wanted to? All you can select at that point is a face because the face filter is turned on.

If you’ve ever had to offset a whole bunch of faces that you couldn’t simply offset by right clicking and selecting tangency but had to pick them one at a time, you know how frustrating this can be, particularly if the faces are small. Once you use the face filter (remember, just press the X key to turn it on) in this situation you’ll never forget about selection filters again.

The key here is that once you’ve selected your face or faces by pressing the X key and making your selection, unless you plan on selecting more faces right away, the very first thing you should do is press the X key one more time to turn off this face filter so that when you go to pick an edge later you are not frustrated by not being able to select anything but a face. You’ll get the hang of it very quickly. And you’ll note that your mouse cursor changes if a filter is on or off. You will know that a filter is set because it will have a funnel next to the arrow cursor.

Read more about selection filters in the last three paragraphs of our previous post called “Convert Entities tips (some of these tips can be used for much more …)”. Of course you can also read more about them in the SolidWorks help file at the topic Selection Filters. (Be sure to learn about the Filter toolbar and know to quickly turn it on and off by pressing the F5 key and note all the other filters that are available, such as V for vertex…)