Grouping shapes provides a way of combining them together, which is reversible. A group can be selected, moved and resized as a single object.
Applying style adjustments to a group, including line stroke, color fill and adding an image, will apply those adjustments to all of the shapes within the group, just the same as if all of the group's shapes were selected without being grouped.
Nested grouping is possible, which means that grouped shapes can be further grouped with other shapes, which may themselves be grouped, or not. You may find it useful to build up hierarchies of grouped shapes by, for example, grouping individual shapes to form components, grouping components to form sub-assemblies, and grouping sub-assemblies to form assemblies.
Grouped shapes can be ungrouped to separate them again. Ungrouping of nested groups is the reverse process of grouping, with each level of nesting being ungrouped one level at a time.
IMPORTANT: To change the style of individual shapes within a group to something different to other shapes within the group, including adding an image, first ungroup the shapes and select the individual shapes.
Start by selecting two or more shapes.
Choose menu option Arrange > Group, or click the Group Shapes toolbar icon, shown here on the left:
The individual sets of resizing handles of the individual shapes will be replaced by a single set of resizing handles for the grouped shape.
Start by selecting a group.
Choose menu option Arrange > Ungroup, or click the Ungroup Shapes toolbar icon, shown here on the right:
Note that if the Ungroup Shapes toolbar icon isn't active this indicates that a selected shape isn't grouped.