I'm trying to simultaneously move all objects in a drawing up and to the left by x distance (working within a map). The drawing is a clipped drawing of the public land survey. It is clearly off (expectedly) in relationship to the cadastral drawing (area), with which I'm trying to get it to align. (It's also off in relation to the township boundaries drawing, which does line up with the cad drawing.)

I've attempted selecting all objects using ctrl a (which of course does select them) then ctrl-shift-click, but can only seem to edit-select one object at a time. (Each individual object within the drawing corresponds with a PLSS section.)

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing or point me to the reference in the manual? Again, thanks for your time.

A couple of ways. Best I find is to work out how far in x & y that you need to move the component and then open Assign Projection and add those values to Local Offset.

You can also have the component active in a map and ctrl arrow will move the component wrt the others.

You're doing it right. It's one at a time.

But you can use the Move Vertically and Move Horizontally transforms on lots of objects at once. That might do it, if you're lucky.

If you're not lucky—if the shift is not uniform, or if it's unifrom but not know exactly, to within the location precision of the drawing—then this isn't going to get you good topology, only a good picture. Getting exact alignment might be quite hard without snaps.

If snaps would do it, but for being able to move only one object at a time, and if the objects to be moved are areas, then I might suggest you use a query to make one multi-branched area out of all selected areas, select and move this multi-branched area manually, using snaps, then decompose it into branches, use a spatial overlay or a query to get attributes from the original areas, and finally, if necessary, dissolve to recombine any areas that were multi-branched in the original. Laborious.

There are other ways to do it. All the ones I've found are hard. If you want to attach a picture of the displacements I could possibly make a better-targetted suggestion since I'm doing a lot of similar correction myself at present.

[Colin's suggestions seem worth trying first, and they suggest a third. You could try using georegistration to fix the alignment.]

Open the map. Make the desired layer active. Press Ctrl-A to select all objects. Ctrl-Alt-click one of the selected objects to get the editing handles (the other objects will stay selected). Click on one of the editing handles and hold the mouse button. Press and hold the Shift key. Drag the editing handle to the new location. Release the mouse button. All selected objects should move.

In short: Shift-drag.

Well I'll be...

Just tried it. Amazing. Glad to have been so thoroughly and completely wrong.

I wouldn't beat my head over it. Your posts are characteristic for containing a lot of useful thoughts which are much appreciated by myself and I am sure many others.

That is super cool. I also had no idea.

cuda shuda wuda

Holding down control and using the grabber (hand) tool does the same thing if you want to move all objects in a drawing (not just a selection). It operates by changing the local offsets so you can undo it if necessary by going into assign projection and changing them back.

Control and arrow keys also does the same thing, which is a bit dangerous if you were just trying to scroll the review using shift-arrow and forgot which key to press, thereby moving all your data about instead of your view. That's were the correction in assign projection comes in really handy.

Very interesting! I have certainly made the mistake of moving things with the arrows inadvertently!

Adam idea is great. And if you want to be more precise on the movement, you can use the snap option to place irt exactly where it should go. Cheers