Selecting with Inkscape

[S3loth]

How do I select something? I imported an image, now how do I select just a part of it and not the whole image. i.e. In PhotoShop or GIMP, you just use the select tool to pick a part to edit, but Inkscape seems to look at it as one big image.
What I am trying to do is use Inkscape and FontForge to make a font. I scaned my handwriting, touched it up in GIMP and converted it to vector in Inkscape. Now I'm trying to get the letters into FontForge

[paulmerchant]

In vector art, the shapes are often grouped. You need to ungroup the shapes before you can select the individual shapes. Just highlight your grouped shapes and select Object | Ungroup. You may have to do that more than once since you can group groups of shapes.