9.14: Grouping Objects
Learning Objectives
- Group objects
- Modify grouped objects
PowerPoint allows you to insert shapes or objects and position them in various ways in a slide. In the previous module you learned how to arrange objects. Now we’ll walk through how to group objects. The main reasons to group objects are to make it easier to move, align or resize objects together. In this example we assume objects have already been arranged and now need to be grouped.
Group Objects
- Open a slide in a PowerPoint presentation containing various shapes or objects arranged in the slide.
-
Start from a corner of the slide, hold the left-mouse button down and drag it to include all objects to be included in a group.
- Release the mouse button and all the objects should be showing that they have been selected by each object showing its rotate arrow, resizing dots, etc.
-
On the
Home
tab, select the
Arrange
button, and in
Group Objects
, select
Group
.
-
Now all the selected objects will be in one group and can be moved, resized, rotated, copied, flipped or rearranged as one group.
Modify Group Objects
Once objects are grouped, they can be modified in a variety of ways including ungrouping and regrouping. We’ll walk through a few steps of how to modify within a group object.
Text
If a group object has resized by either enlarging or shrinking and there is text involved within the group, check to see if it now needs to be modified. When a group is resized, text retains its original font size. To resize it, triple click on the text and all text in an object is selected. A menu will appear to change the size to fit the object.
Shapes
Within a group, an individual object can be moved around without affecting the other objects. To move a specific object in a group, select the object and drag it to a new position.
Ungroup/Regroup
If after repositioning or adjusting a group you no longer want the objects to act as one group, go back to the Home, Arrange, Group Objects, selecting Ungroup. If you decide that you’d rather have them as a group again, select all the objects and select the Regroup option.
Note
In Office 365 PowerPoint, grouping can be done with all kinds of objects; video, audio, pictures, shapes, etc. It was not possible in earlier PowerPoint versions to group video and pictures together.
Contributors and Attributions
- Grouping Objects. Authored by : Sherri Pendleton. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution