Selecting Many Elements

Work with many elements at once: marquee and multi-select, and the format painter for copying a look.

Diagrams rarely come together one shape at a time. Once a few elements are on the canvas you will want to move several at once, keep related pieces together, and make a row of shapes share the same look. livediagram gives you the tools for exactly that: selecting many elements, frames, and the format painter. None of them need a sign-in, so you can open a canvas and try them straight away.

Selecting More Than One

The quickest way to grab several elements is the marquee: drag across an empty patch of canvas and a selection rectangle picks up every element that sits entirely inside it. You can also build a selection click by click with Shift, or press Cmd / Ctrl + A to select everything on the tab. Either way, the selection becomes a single thing you can move, copy, lock, or restyle in one go. See Marquee and Multi-Select for every way to gather a selection.

Drag a marquee across empty canvas to gather every fully enclosed element into one selection.

Keeping Elements Together

A selection scatters as soon as you click away. When some elements should keep travelling together, draw a frame around them: moving the frame carries everything inside it. And when the thing you are building is really one object, such as a banner, a KPI row or a website header, reach for a component, which is a single element rather than pieces you have to hold together.

Copying a Look

Once you have styled one element just right, the format painter copies that look onto others in a couple of clicks, so a whole diagram can share one consistent style without re-setting each colour and border by hand.

StyledPainted
The format painter picks up one element's look and brushes it onto another.

The format painter paints one element per click: pick up a styled element's look, then click each shape in the row in turn to brush it on.

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