Allen Jessup, an engineering specialist, expands on Rebekah Wolf’s AutoCAD tip "Grip-Editing With Polylines."

"In AutoCAD 2011, hold down the Ctrl key while selecting a portion of a polyline with either a window or crossing window. You will see that all the grips associated with those selected segments are highlighted. After releasing Ctrl, start the Move command. You can now move only the vertices selected — which is the same as selecting those vertices individually and using Stretch.

"You can also rotate those grips, but that can give some strange results. In addition, you can delete those sections of the polyline selected and leave the rest intact. Scale will work too, but that one can yield some unexpected results as well."

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: Working with polylines in AutoCAD has become more interesting in recent releases, especially with grip-editing. This method allows you to grip-edit specific polyline segments. It selects only the grips associated with the selected segment(s). If you need to keep the geometric relationship between those segments, then this tip will save you a lot of time.