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About this lesson

Group various shapes together into a single slide object to help you position the group of shapes in a specific location, while still gaining access to the size and formatting options available within PowerPoint for those individual shapes.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2010, 2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Group and Ungroup Shapes.pptx
43.1 KB Group and Ungroup Shapes - Complete.pptx
89.3 KB

Quick reference

Topic

Grouping multiple objects into a single object.

When to use

When it’s easier to treat multiple objects as a single object – to move, resize or apply an animation.

Instructions

Group objects

  • Select the various objects, and either:
    • Right-click on the object selection, click the Group menu item, and then click Group, or
    • Use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+G.

Ungroup grouped objects

  • Select the various objects, and either:
    • Right-click on the object selection, click the Group menu item, and then click Ungroup, or
    • Use keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G.

Regroup previously grouped objects

  • Select one of the previously grouped objects, then right-click on the object selection, click the Regroup.
  • Select the group of objects with the pointer.
  • Select the single object within the group.
  • Move the object with either the pointer by dragging or bumping the object with the arrow keys on the keyboard.

Move a single object within a group

Also note:

Grouping objects allows you to move, resize, rotate or apply various formats to objects. You can learn more about this feature by experimenting with it.

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  • 00:05 This video is all about grouping and ungrouping objects. The reason you might group objects together is that, if you have a lot of objects on
  • 00:11 your slide and it becomes a very complex environment to work in, you can group similar objects and treat them as one object within your
  • 00:18 presentation. So to demonstrate that I have three rounded rectangles with a colored background fill, so this is an orange one, a
  • 00:26 yellow one, and a blue one. You can certainly see that they are different objects because I can move them around as well as you can see the
  • 00:32 external selection handles. If I draw a marquee with a mouse over those, or I could use the CTRL A keyboard shortcut, right click the group
  • 00:42 menu, go group, and there they are within a group. They now function as a distinct object on that slide. And we can apply animations to that
  • 00:51 and do all kind of things. And even though that is grouped I can still right click and go ungroup, so I’ll go CTRL Z and put that back into a group, but
  • 01:02 we can also use keyboard shortcuts, so, for example, ungrouping is CTRL SHIFT G and there they are in the three original objects, or
  • 01:11 CTRL G and they are grouped again, so I’ll go CTRL Z. Another item is if we manipulate a particular shape that’s not grouped but it’s been
  • 01:20 grouped before, we can select one particular object, right click, go to the group menu item, regroup; PowerPoint remembers all of the items
  • 01:29 that were in that group and regroups them back together, very simple. Now, say for example, we wanted to apply a very complex animation to
  • 01:37 this particular group, and then we decide to change something. If we undid the group and busted that into individual objected we’d lose the
  • 01:47 animation, but PowerPoint comes with the ability to select particular objects, so with the group selected I can again select that particular
  • 01:56 rounded rectangle and move it around. I can even apply a particular shape styles effect to that and, when you do that, make sure that they
  • 02:05 all balance and work together. So you can group objects, ungroup them, regroup them as well as select individual objects within a group and you
  • 02:13 don’t lose the grouping of those objects. And notice that with one single set of external selection handles, I can resize that group, as
  • 02:23 well as move them around in unison, so that’s very handy. So very quickly we’re going to have a look at a special kind of picture. This has been
  • 02:31 inserted from online clipart and its a Windows metafile. I drag that image to the right, CTRL SHIFT drag, release so I get a duplicate copy of
  • 02:40 it. I’m going to right click on the image, go to the grouping menu, ungroup, PowerPoint pops up a dialog box and says it’s a picture not a group;
  • 02:50 do I want to convert it to a Microsoft office drawing object? I say yes, right click again, group, ungroup, and there is a picture that’s
  • 02:59 been composed of a bunch of shapes and lines now busted into its individual objects. So the first thing to do is to select the bounding frame
  • 03:09 with the mouse, delete; if we wish, we could draw a marquee over that, go CTRL G, and group all of those items together and now it’s a
  • 03:21 single group. The beauty of that is because they’re shapes, we can apply shape effects such as a pre-set and pre-set 4 and we get that
  • 03:29 nice little change in picture, or we can go pre-set like that and it works very well, so remember that some pictures are actually composed of
  • 03:39 shapes and you can do various effects with them. So in summary, it’s very easy to group objects that are similar so that you can work
  • 03:47 with them in unison, as one object. You can still get to particular items and individual objects within that group, you can ungroup, you can
  • 03:54 regroup, and some special formats of pictures such as Windows metafiles are really grouped shapes and if you ungroup them twice you can
  • 04:03 work with them as well. It’s very handy and very useful to know.

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