Sometimes, we do not need the entire XRef. We might need only a part of it. But when you insert a drawing as an XRef, all its objects are inserted in the drawing. Once it is inserted in the drawing, you can clip it to remove the parts that you don't need. Clipping an XRef does not remove the part from the host drawing, it only hides it from the drawing area.

In the following example, I will clip the Work area section in our example drawing containing multiple XRefs so that only the desks and chairs are visible in the drawing and the rest of the objects from the Work area drawing are hidden:

1. Click on the Work area drawing in the AutoCAD workspace.
2. Click on the Create Clipping Boundary option in the Clipping panel of the External References tab.
3. Lots of options will now show up on the command line. Select Polygonal, as shown in Figure 9.15:

4. Click on different points so that you end up with a polygon that includes the desks and chairs, as shown in Figure 9.16. Press Enter once you are done making your clipping polygon:

5. Now, the Work area XRef will be clipped, and either the part inside the clipping boundary or outside the boundary will appear in the drawing area. In my case, the part inside the clipping polygon showed up.
6. To reverse the direction of the clipping, click the arrow grip, as shown in Figure 9.17:

7. Press the Esc key once you are done clipping the XRef. As mentioned earlier, this only hides the remaining part of the XRef. You can remove the clipping to reveal the hidden part of the XRef.
8. To remove the clipping, select the clipped XRef or click on the clipping polygon boundary and click on the Remove Clipping option in the Clipping panel of the External References tab.
9. The clipping will be removed from the selected XRef, and the entire XRef will now be displayed in the drawing area.

That was all about clipping XRefs. In the next section, we will talk about the External Referencess palette, which is like the control panel of XRefs, and you can use this palette to modify many settings related to inserted XRefs.