Civil technician R.T. Rinehart discusses the Overkill command, a handy tool that will help you clean up a drawing that has similar objects stacked on top of each other.

"Do you ever receive drawings from architects that have multiple lines on top of one another? One example is a floor plan external reference that has been referenced into several different drawings and then bound into one. There may be 15 different instances of a particular wall line in one drawing, and that's just no fun at all.

"To clean up this redundancy, simply enter Overkill at the command line, select the entire drawing or just the offending lines, and click Enter. The Overkill dialog box appears, giving you options to control the filtering of the entities by ignoring layer, line type, color, line weight, and plot style, as well as the options to combine co-linear objects based upon endpoints and to overlap by numeric fuzz. Perhaps the coolest feature is the Optimize Polylines command, which will help weed out unwanted vertices. Explore these options to quickly eliminate those pesky overdraws."

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: One of the Express Tools, the Overkill command is also known as the Delete Duplicate Objects command. Overkill will delete objects of the same type that are drawn in exactly the same way. If a line on layer 10 has another line on top of it that is also on layer 10, Overkill will delete one of the two. If the second line is on a different layer, it will be left alone, unless you turn on the Ignore Layer option when you start the command. The same behavior can be expected for the other Ignore settings.

For a video demonstration of the Overkill command, check out Overkill Can Be a Good Thing on the Cadalyst Video Gallery, a tip from Cadalyst and Autodesk technical evangelist Lynn Allen.