I can't believe how many times this has frustrated me with Sonar. You want to remove a portion of time from the start of a song. You want everything within those measures to be deleted, and everything which remains to shift along by that number of measures to the left. This should be doable with a simple, hassle free, bug free and foolproof one click method. It shouldn't matter whether or not there is data on every track in the area you want to delete. It shouldn't matter whether or not there is data on any of the tracks. You are simply deleting time. If there's data within that time, delete it. If there isn't, why should Sonar care? Shift everything else along to the left to fill the hole, retaining all clip positions in relation to each other. You shouldn't have to lasso anything and manually drag it. You shouldn't have to worry about whether or not you've selected the automation with your clips. In the vast majority of cases, you want that automation to move with the clips it was automating. 
 
Why is this so hard in Sonar? Whenever I have to do this I end up tearing my hair out and seriously think about switching DAW's. I love this program but there are some aspects of it that just defy belief and this is one of them. 
 
This question has been asked by people on the forum SO many times and in every case people chime in with this long drawn out convoluted process of inserting dummy clips, setting snap, using "Delete special" and then lassoing stuff to shift it across manually. Anyone reading the manual's explanation of how to delete time is going to be horribly confused and frustrated, as am I whenever I read it. I just tried it on a project that had data on some of the tracks in the area I wanted to delete. I selected all tracks, selected the measures on the time ruler, chose "delete special," ticked all the boxes and yet some of the tracks moved across while others stayed where they were. It did not work as expected at all because the tracks which did not contain data weren't shifted across while the ones which did contain data were shifted. But they were only shifted to the point at which their data started, not to the start of the time range which I specified. And then of course, the tracks were out of whack with each other. This is horrible and I can't believe we're still dealing with it in Sonar 2016. 
 
How come we get "style dials" which give us a  quick "one knob" way of adding effects, while such a basic song arranging operation as deleting time and plugging the gap has this horribly awkward and confusing process which everyone dreads doing? How many times have you been put off improving or experimenting with the arrangement of your music because things like this are so unbelievably annoying and error prone in Sonar? 
 
So to recap, a "delete time" function should:
 
1) Delete ALL data in the area you specify
2) Move ALL data to the left to fill the gap. 
 
No nonsense, no worrying about tracks losing their relationship with each other, no manual selecting and dragging of clips, just the simple process as described in bold above, something which should be as simple as deleting a word in a word processor and having the remaining text reposition itself to fill the hole. Please! 

Totally agree. :D

And what makes it all worse is that if you DO choose to go down the "delete everything in the space you wish to delete then drag everything else across" route, that doesn't take into account things like time signature or tempo changes. So you have to go down the road of inserting dummy clips on every track so that you can use "delete special" and its associated options to shift across sigs and tempos. 
 
I can't believe the Bakers have gone this long thinking that this shouldn't be addressed ASAP. 

This thing should definitely be addressed.  Could not agree more

+1, ripple delete please.

Check this out. I want to delete the first 42 bars (the empty space) of this project and move everything else across to plug the gap. There was data in that gap but I manually deleted it with a view to manually shifting everything across (because Delete Hole does not work the way you want it to, not in a million years). 
 
There are various time signature changes in the project and I want to preserve those - they must be shifted across too. Basically the entire project starting at measure 42 needs to be preserved exactly as it is, but shifted 42 measures to the left. Here's what I started with. Everything starting from measure 42 is selected in preparation. Take particular note of the 4th track from the top. Its clips start at measure 192, right on a time sig change. 
 

 
So with this selection made, I select "copy special" and make sure everything is checked. I then select "paste special" making sure that "replace old with new" along with all the options in "what to paste." This is what I ended up with. 
 

 
Take a look at that 4th track from the top again. It's hard to see at this size and zoom level, but its final destination, after selecting a paste location 42 measures to the left, was measure 112 (in fact the 2nd beat of measure 112, not even the start of the measure!). It has traveled not 42 measures but 80 measures. Now I'm too lazy to do the math to take into account tim sig changes, but it is easy to see by comparing the two screenshots that this track has not retained its relationship to the other tracks. In fact a comparison of the two screenshots reveals that many of the tracks are now out of whack with each other. I just don't have the heart to work out exactly what's out of whack with what, and nor should I have to. I'm totally done. I started the evening with the pleasant intention of revamping a project that's a couple of years old, which would involve a bit of tidying and trimming before getting stuck into the meat and potatoes of the music, which I was really looking forward to. Instead I've wasted a couple of hours trying to do something which should be doable with one click, and feeling my blood pressure go through the roof in the process. This isn't just a minor annoyance with an easy workaround, it's an absolute train wreck of a PITA, basic song editing functionality in a pro DAW which is well and truly broken. 
 

I have to admit this always frustrates me too. When it's the beginning of a project it's less important, I'll just move my starting point. But sometimes I have to delete a section in the middle and inevitably something will be screwed up and require manual repositioning. I completely agree; deleting time from a project should DELETE TIME, not just time on those tracks where there happen to be clips in that section.

I would genuinely love to know why this has never been fixed. It's akin to basic copy and paste functions having always been broken in MS Word, or cropping functionality not working properly in Photoshop. I just can't wrap my head around it. 

I have gotten into the habit of using loop markers to "constrain" the project when similar happens. It is the easiest work around I could think of since rewind will then stop at the start boundary. I also leave 2 bars of dead space at the beginning of projects (habit since 1998) to avoid the "start at time zero" issues over the years, so most projects have loop markers enabled in them (even though not always on).

Good thinking mettelus.