Grouping in PowerPoint - Troubleshooting Issues in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows

Grouping slide objects in PowerPoint is one of the fundamental skills that slide designers use all the time, and sometimes, they might run into issues that need troubleshooting. On this page, we will list any such problems and describe their resolutions.

Group Option is Grayed Out

Access the Group options, and you will find that you cannot choose it any longer, and it is grayed out. This behavior can happen when you are trying to group placeholders on a slide with other slide objects. Placeholders are special objects on a slide that are part of the slide layout. For example, in a conventional bulleted slide, the title and text box are often placeholders, and these cannot be grouped with other inserted slide objects like shapes, pictures, or charts. That's the reason your Group option may be grayed out.

It's also found that if you use the Photo Album feature to create slides with imported pictures, then you cannot group them with pictures inserted using the Insert menu of tab options.