1. Hold down Alt+Shift.
2. Drag a deselection box around those shapes that you don’t want to include in your selection.

Use a deselection box to remove the child shapes of a compound shape from your selection.

1. For example, select a database entity (in an entity relationship diagram).
2. Hold down Alt+Shift and drag a deselection box around just the rows inside of the entity to remove them from your selection.