Microsoft Visio 2010 : Organizing and Annotating Diagrams - Groups

In Visio any two or more shapes can be grouped together. As your Visio experience grows, you will see that groups come in two flavors:

Groups are useful and have their place, but they also cause some problems. When shapes are grouped together, they get buried inside a group shell, which hides data, makes formatting awkward, and can be confusing to users.

In fact, the shortcomings of groups provided impetus for the invention of containers and lists. Nevertheless, you should understand how groups work in Visio, and how to recognize them, as well as how and why to use them.

Creating a Grouped Shape

1.	Create a new drawing from any template.
2.	Drop three shapes on a page.
3.	Select all three shapes.
4.	In the Arrange group on the Home tab, click the Group drop-down and select Group.
5.	Move the group. Note that all the subshapes move with the group. That’s the point of grouping!
6.	With the group still selected, choose a new fill color either from the Home tab or by right-clicking. Note that all the subshapes are colored. This is a potential drawback of groups.
7.	Type some text while the group is selected. Notice that the text goes to the group, not to any of the subshapes.
8.	Move one of the subshapes. To do this, you need to subselect a shape. First, click the group, pause for a second, and then click on one of the subshapes. You should see lighter-blue selection handles around the subshape and a dashed line around the entire group, as shown in Figure 1. You can now move the subshape within the group. Figure 1. Three network shapes grouped together, with the White Blue Group server subselected. Subselected shapes have lighter-colored handles, and a dashed line shows the parent group.
9.	Reselect the group. To do this, first deselect everything by clicking on a blank area of the page or pressing the Esc key. Then click once on the group to reselect it.
10.	Ungroup the shape. In the Arrange group on the Home tab, click the Group drop-down and then select Ungroup. You now have four shapes. Of course, you get your original three shapes back, but you also have one more “clear” shape that holds the text that you typed on the group.

When to Use Groups

You should use groups in the following scenarios:

• For creating a single shape. If you are creating a shape that will be used as a single graphic, and users don’t need to have access to its innards, grouping is appropriate. If your shape needs to have multiple text blocks, or details with different fill and line colors, you have to group separate pieces together.

• For temporary movement or arrangement. Perhaps you need to align a set of shapes with another set, while maintaining spacing within the set. You can quickly group your shapes together, move them around, align them, and ungroup them.

• For planned ungrouping. An example could be an office plan where you have several standard arrangements of furniture. These arrangements could be stored as grouped units on a “library” page. Users could copy an arrangement to the floorplan page for placement in an office and then ungroup to get the individual equipment and furniture items.

  You could even store such assemblies in stencils as masters and ungroup them after dropping them into a drawing. But Visio presents a warning when you ungroup masters, which can be unpleasant for users.

When Not to Use Groups

You might not want to use groups in the following scenarios:

• For creating categorical relationships. For example, you want to show which servers are in North America and which are in Asia on a network diagram. This is a good application for containers, not groups.

• If your shapes have Shape Data fields that need to be readily edited by users of your diagram. Grouping buries data fields and forces users to subselect to get at the data.

• If your shapes have other custom features such as right-click actions or control handles that users will need to manipulate. Grouping buries these features as well.

• If you expect that users of your diagram won’t understand groups and subselecting subshapes.

If you are creating shapes for others to use, they might not know about subselecting within groups and might find it awkward. If you don’t mind subselecting and are the only user of your shapes, then these caveats take on less importance.

Editing Inside a Group

If you want to change the look of a grouped shape, especially one that came from a stencil, you should add graphics inside the group. Many beginners try to ungroup a shape, add graphics, and then regroup the shape. This approach works for groups of shapes that have been temporarily grouped together, but not for custom shapes that may have special behaviors.

For example, the Server shape from the Network and Peripherals stencil is a grouped shape that has 22 Shape Data fields. It also has a special control handle that enables you to reposition its text block easily.

If you ungroup the Server shape, you destroy the text/control handle behavior and obliterate the shape data fields. Regrouping doesn’t bring them back.

Editing Inside of a Group

If you like the idea of adding icons to server shapes, be sure to check out my “Visio Network Server Shape Icon Customization Tool” at http://www.visguy.com/2009/09/11/visio-server-shape-icon-customization-tool/. It uses a VBA macro to automatically perform steps 1-7 at the click of a button!