Get in the Group

So, you've just spent the last 15 minutes putting together drawn elements from the drawing toolbar and it looks great!

You've got it exactly right, except it should really be larger and probably, now that you think about it, in a different location.

Oh no!

Can you imagine? All that work!

All those little elements to move, resize and place back together exactly as you have them now.

It could make you crazy just thinking about it.

Well then, before you get too far into the "crazy zone," let's talk about a better solution.

Let's talk about grouping those objects together.

That is, tell the program to "group" all the small elements together and treat it as one object.

What are the advantages of that, you ask?

Just about the best things you could imagine at this moment. A grouped object allows you to move them all together as one item and you can resize them as a single item too!

Interested?

Yeah, I was too when I first learned about this one, so let's move on to the good stuff.

The first thing you need to do is select all the items to be grouped.

One way is to hold down the Shift key while you click on each individual item.

You should notice that all items selected will have their little "grabbers" displayed.

Another way, possibly a faster way, of selecting multiple items is to turn on the Select Objects tool from the Drawing toolbar.

Once you turn this tool on, all you have to do is drag a rectangle in your document around your drawing objects.

When you release the mouse button, all the objects in the rectangle will be selected.

Whatever method you use, once all the objects are selected, you're ready to complete the grouping.

You can either go to the Draw menu on the Drawing toolbar and select the Group choice or you can right click over the selected objects, go to the Grouping submenu and choose Group.

Again, regardless of the way you make it happen, once you're done, you should now have a single set of object "grabbers" around all the items.

You can now resize and move the entire grouped object in one quick maneuver.

What was that you asked?

You need to be able to get them apart again to edit?

No problem.

Use either the Draw menu, Ungroup choice or the right click menu, Grouping submenu, Ungroup choice to make the objects individual again.

That's it! That's all there is to making many into one and back to many again!

~ April