Working With Groups in Visio

Visio hasn't automated everything yet! There are many situations where the relative dispositions of shapes should be maintained at all times, if not most of the time you are using them. Such situations may arise in the case of composite shapes, furniture or equipment layouts, area and building plans. The list goes on and I'm sure the need applies to your use of Visio Technical in some way.

Visio enables you to keep shapes together by creating a group. A group of shapes functions as a single unit. To copy, move or otherwise manipulate the related shapes you only need to select the group.

You can create a group temporarily to speed up a large layout drawing. When the shapes are in  place you can ungroup each instance and remove the association between the shapes.

Where the relationships of shapes will remain constant, shapes can remain grouped and can be protected from accidental change by setting non-zero values in cells of the Protection section of the group ShapeSheet.

Groups can include any kind of shapes, guides, other groups and objects from other programs.

Some guidelines for working with groups:

• You can format. move, rotate, flip and reverse groups.
• Individual shapes within a group can still be manipulated without ungrouping. This is done by double-clicking on the group and editing in the group window
• You can set behaviors for individual shapes relative to its group
• When you create a group, Visio creates a group ShapeSheet describing the group attributes. This ShapeSheet is maintained as long as the group exists. Shapes still retain their own ShapeSheets.
• To add a guide and shapes glued to it, you must select both the guide and glued shapes before you add them to the group or the glue will melt.
• Bitmaps and other imported items cannot be rotated under any circumstances.
• To rotate any other non-bitmap object, you must first convert it to a Visio group.
• Changing shapes within a group may result in the group alignment box not fit its dimensions. Fix it by selecting Tools > Update Alignment Box