The image below shows a screen with several ojects.
toolbar button. If you click on one of the items it will be selected as indicated by the 'chooser' around the object.
You can now either right click to get the Format menu to change the objects format or select Format from the main menu. To add other objects to the selection you can hold the Shift key down and click on the objects you want to add to your selection.
The selection rectangle is expanded and each object that is selected shows a frame around it. You can now apply any changes to your selected objects to the entire group. Depending on what kind of objects are in the group certain format options might be enabled. Lets say you select data items only, the Format/Data Item... menu will be enabled, however, if you have a static object in the selection like in the sample above the Format/Data Item... menu will be disabled since the static object in the selection doesn't support Data Item formats. This applies similarly to other object combinations. If all objects in a selection have the same value for a certain property, say the foreground color is red, this value will be selected for this property. However, if at least one object in the selection has a different value from all other objects in the selection the value for this property is set to the default value.
Another way of selecting one or multiple objects is to choose select mode and to click on the screen and drag open a selection rectangle. All objects that wholly fall within the rectangle will be selected:
