Illustrator - selecting objects from selected "layers"

Question

Is there any way to... Let's say I got a layer with 15 paths. I want to select 8 of them by clicking first and then shift+clicking eighth. Now I want to operate on them, e.g. change color. How to translate this "layers" selection to actual objects selection?

Answer 1

In the Illustrator Layers palette, there are two selection modes: the one in which you are selecting the layer entity for doing layer operations like dragging above, grouping into a new layer etc - and then one in which you are selecting the actual geometry - to do this, you click the little radio button to the right of the item's name.

This selection type does not support shift-click first, shift-click-last multi-item selection, but does support shift-click each to create a multi-item selection, at which point you can edit all elements.