“Can’t make the selection into guides. Guides cannot be created or released within the selected object types.”

Didja know you can turn any vector shape in Illustrator into a guide?

Yeah…you can. Select what you want to turn into a guide and then go to View>Guides>Make Guides in the top bar menu. Your selected shapes will be treated as guides exactly like the horizontal and vertical guides that you get by dragging the pointer out of the ruler bars.

What if I get the above error message?

Notice I said you can make any shape into a guide. Type objects are not considered shapes, at least not in the same way as squares, circles, triangles and other vectors are. If you have type objects in the group of objects that you are trying to convert to a guide, you will get the above error message.

Resolution

If there are one or two type objects, resolving this is as easy as selecting everything, holding down Shift, and clicking on each separate type object to deselect.

As the set of objects becomes more complex and harder to work with, try this: Go to Select>Object>Text Objects. This will select only the text. Now hold Shift while drawing a box around everything you want to convert to a guide using the Black Arrow tool. You will select “everything else” and deselect the text objects at the same time. Now convert to guides.

I’m currently working with a converted AutoCad file which I am using to build a map of campus in Illustrator. The file looks right, but none of the vectors are continuous paths: they’re line segments that look like continuous paths. In this case, it’s really difficult to draw a box that selects only what i want to select so I’ve fallen back on a Select Same Stroke Color to grab just the line segments that have the same stroke color as my selected line. This can be accessed through Select>Same>Stroke Color. Also notice that you can (naturally) indicate a selection by Fill color in the same sub menu.