Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

Group Shapes

Sometimes you’ll want to perform the same operation on more than one shape. The easiest way to do that is to group the shapes using the ShapeRange object, then perform the operation on that object. The following code demonstrates how to group objects as a ShareRange:

Sub GroupObjects( )
    Dim ws As Worksheet, s As Shape, sr As ShapeRange
    Set ws = ActiveSheet
    ' Create a ShapeRange containing the last two shapes drawn.
    Set sr = ws.Shapes.Range(Array(ws.Shapes.Count - 1, ws.Shapes.Count))
    ' Flip the objects
    sr.Flip msoFlipHorizontal
    ' Group the objects in the Excel UI.
    sr.Group
End Sub

The ShapeRange object’s Group method groups the objects so they can be moved, resized, or deleted as a unit by the user. If you run GroupObjects after InsertWordArt, both the wombat and the text are flipped, as shown in Figure 18-10.

Figure 18-10. Grouping objects with ShapeRange

The ShareRange object has almost all of the same members as the Shape object, and as with Shape, some of those members aren’t valid for certain types of shapes.