How to group and lock objects in Pages - iWork tutorial

When you have layouts that are heavy with elements such as boxes and images, it can make designing much more like hard work. Especially when you want to move or edit something and you find that you’ve clicked on the wrong thing and it’s moved that instead. Or when you want to move a group of objects and find that you can’t seem to select them all and you end up moving just one thing, ruining your design. Even though you can always select Undo, in Pages there are a couple of tools that will prevent these problems from occurring and make page layout easier. Firstly, Locking will basically lock an object in place so that you can avoid accidentally moving or editing it. Grouping will group items together so you can move them all at the same time, which is handy for a group of images that have been carefully positioned. Read on to find out how.

Step 1: Lock
Once you have the basic elements of your design in place that you won’t want to move (such as the background), click on the object, head to the Arrange drop-down menu at the top of the interface and select Lock.

Step 2: Unlock
You won’t be able to edit or move the locked item, which is indicated by small crosses at the corners and central points. To unlock, repeat the previous step but select Unlock from the Arrange menu.

Step 3: Group
To group together a selection of items, click on one and then hold down the shift key while selecting the others. Head up to the Arrange menu and select Group.

Step 4: Ungroup
The grouped objects will appear as a single item when clicked on. To ungroup, select the group and head back to Arrange and simply select the Ungroup option.

Click on the image below to zoom in on the annotations.