Selecting objects in Revit is extremely hard.

[andkal]

Hello Revit Community,
I would like to share a few ideas for improving the basic operating in Revit. I will present them in this and next posts.

Selecting objects in Revit extremely hard.

A would have a request to Autodesk to work a little bit on making selecting objects in Revit easier because it is ver very hard and it is irritating how effort I have to put to pick objects. Revit nearly always (90% of the cases) selects not what I want.

It seems to me that the programmers couldn't do it right so they implemented a function to toggle objects with Tab button. In Autocad for example it is simple - I can select that on what I point the cursor.

Example 1:
If the user hovers a mouse cursor on the pipe to select it, Revit selects some other objects like they have some invisible boundaries that are accidentally in a range of the cursor.

Example 2:
The user cannot normally mark an object until he reaches with the cursor the end of invisible boundaries of the object.

[Susana_Duarte_LMSI]

Yes... I hate that behaviour. 

For example, when we have sprinklers or fire hoses or taps with a circle line to show the influence area of those objects, the selection area of the object becomes that total area even when you don't have that line sub-category visible. 

That area can be very big (25 meters big), so we can end up selecting an object 25 meters afar without even realizing. This is a big problem! Making the "object box" to adjust to the visible elements could help to solve this problem a bit.

PS: The fact that the line is 2D or 3D does not influence the behaviour. This problem also afects the preview of the object in the Property window, making the object so small that you cannot see it...

[wr.marshall]

As a reminder, but not sure if will resolve there are theses options. I often forget the filter button and how handy it is!!!

[Ric_Weber]

Also located here in the lower right corner:

[ks2_wmb]

So, I've got this custom door family, and the clickable reference planes are just too long most of the time...

(cursor accidentally omitted because windows snipping tool)

I'm not sure the Tab button can be completely eliminated from the workflow.  The default workflow of selecting objects by their edges means objects usually have coincident edges, and the program can't correctly guess what the user wants on the first try.

[wr.marshall]

@ks2_wmb in family editor set any reference plane not required to "not a reference", but by doing so you wont be able to align that with anything

[Scott_D_]

This causes chaos with Selection Boxes as well.

Things don't crop properly and the initial view that is created with the Selection Box command is massively zoomed out for an unknown reason.

[Susana_Duarte_LMSI]

It would be interesting also to apply a filter before selecting and not after selecting all the model, because that can take precious time. I know we could apply temporary view properties to isolate what we want to select, but having the option to skipp that pass would be nice.