Hi again Katrina,
I'm happy to help if I can. It's easy to get terms and meanings crossed up, especially on an internet forum like this, and dealing with quite a complicated subject...
In fact, what I want to do, is select objects (that are on sublayers, not the sublayers themselves).
Yes, OK. Let's call them objects then. My method does select the objects on the desired sublayers. That's the thing about this little workaround. In order to select the objects, you first want to select the sublayers themselves, temporarily. Selecting the sublayers is just a means to get to the end goal of selecting the objects within the sublayers.
I want to select the objects that reside on multiple sublayers.
That's precisely what my method accomplishes.
This is on clients work, so I need to be careful in what the steps are that I'm executing after the selection.
Of course! The first thing you should do is a make a couple of copies of the original and put them in safe places, maybe one to the cloud or whatever. Then you'll always have that original to go back to right?
Collecting in a new layer may disturb an appearance that has been applied to a top layer.
It's only a temporary action. The new layer you create is deleted in Step 5, returning all of your now active objects/sublayers to their original hierarchy within the layers panel.
I choose to select objects from the layers palette versus clicking on the art to keep from accidentally moving something unintentionally.
Well this method accomplishes just that, and does so exclusively from within the layers panel. There is no need to click on the art using my method. Anyhow if you want to make sure that you don't move anything in your document inadvertently, what you should be doing is locking all of the layers and sublayers which you're not dealing with at the time using the lock feature within the layers panel.
Most of the times I'm going to group these items, in their original hierarchy of sublayer/layers so that I'm not disturbing an appearance. But at times, I'm going to delete them.
My video below demonstrates how to select and group a series of objects/sublayers. As for deleting a series of sublayers from the layers panel just highlight the first and last sublayers (as shown in Step 1 in the video), then simply click on the trash bin icon at the bottom right of the Layers panel:
So I need a simple way to select objects that reside on multiple sublayers.
This way is pretty simple Katrina!
Check it out: