How to Group Elements in Google Slides on Mobile and PC

When you have multiple objects in your Google Slides, you might find it easy to group them together and perform a task on all of them together rather than individually. For example, groups will come in handy if you want to move intersecting shapes and text boxes. If you’ve been wondering how to group things together in Google Slides on mobile and PC, you’ve come to the right place.

This article covers group elements such as images, shapes, text boxes, etc., temporarily and permanently. Once grouped together, you can move and format them (resize, flip, etc.) together.

Let’s check the step of grouping objects in Google Slides on Android, iPhone, Windows, and Mac.

To note: You can group all types of elements like images, shapes, text boxes, graphics and more in Google Slides. However, only items from the same slide can be grouped together.

How to group items in Google Slides on PC

There are three ways to group items on a computer.

Method 1: Temporarily group

One of the easiest and fastest ways to group items together is to select them by the click and drag method. All items that fall within the selected range will be selected. A blue border around them can identify the selected items. Now move, resize or perform any desired action on the selected objects.

Method 2: Group using the Shift key

The above method has the disadvantage that you cannot choose which items you want to group. They can be in or out of the selection range. To better group the elements, use the Shift key on your keyboard.

First, click on one of the items you want to group together. Then while pressing the Shift key, click other items to select them. In this way, you can temporarily group several selected items. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have grouped two images at opposite ends and a text box in the middle.

To ungroup elements, click outside the selection. Interestingly, you can deselect items if you want to remove them from your group without crossing them off right off the bat. To do this, hold down the Shift key and click on the item you want to deselect.

advice: Find out how to use hyperlinks in Google Slides.

Method 3: Group permanently

In both of the above methods, once you click somewhere, it unmounts the group. To keep the group for future tasks, you will need to use the Group function. There are several ways to access it. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Select the items you want to group together. To select, you can use method 1 or 2 mentioned above i.e. drag or use Shift key.

2nd step: Once the items are selected, right click on any selected item and select Group.

To ungroup elements, click outside the selection. Interestingly, you can deselect items if you want to remove them from your group without crossing them off right off the bat. To do this, hold down the Shift key and click on the item you want to deselect.

You can also ungroup items in several ways.

• Click on one of the grouped items and right click on it. Select Ungroup.
• Click any grouped item and select Organize> Ungroup.
• Use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Alt + Shift + G (Windows) and Command + Option + Shift + G (Mac) to ungroup items.

How to Group Items in Google Slides on Android and iPhone

Similar to PC, you can also group items temporarily or permanently on mobile. To temporarily group, open the Google slide you want to edit. Long press the first item you want to group. Now tap on the other objects you want to select. You will see that the size of the selection box will increase. Take the required action. To unpair, tap anywhere outside the selection.

To permanently group items together, touch and hold the first item, then touch other objects. Then tap the group objects icon at the top. Even if you select other objects or perform other tasks, the items that you have grouped will remain locked.

To ungroup locked items, touch and hold one of the grouped items. Then tap the same group icon you used to group the items together. It will dissociate them.

Fixed: Button group button grayed out in Google Slides

If the Group option appears grayed out in Google Slides, you need to check if you have correctly selected the multiple items as shown above. If multiple items are not selected, you will not be able to group them together.

Spice up Google Slides

There are several ways you can edit the images and add bitmojis to personalize your Google slides. If you want to further enhance your Google presentations, you can add animations to them.