How to ungroup and edit a map in PowerPoint

Ungrouping is one menu item and about four ways to get it wrong. Here is what the command needs in order to work, what it does to the map, and how to edit thousands of shapes once it has.

Why the shortcut does nothing

Ctrl+Shift+G is Ungroup, and on a map that arrived as a screenshot it does nothing at all: the menu item is grayed out and the keys produce no message. The reason is that the command applies to shapes, and a picture is not one. It has no parts to separate, only pixels.

That single fact explains most of the frustration in this task. The map looks like a map of separable areas; the object is one rectangle of color. Everything below is about getting from the second to the first.

Turning a picture into shapes

A raster image — a PNG or a JPG — cannot be converted. There is no outline to recover, and tracing one produces a shape that looks right at slide size and falls apart when it is enlarged.

A vector image can be. If the file is an SVG, insert it with Insert → Pictures, then use Picture Format → Convert to Shape. An EMF or WMF pasted from another application arrives as a group already, and Group → Ungroup separates it. Both routes produce the same result: one shape per drawn area, each one editable, and each one keeping the name the source file gave it.

Ungrouping a map that is already made of shapes

1. Click the map once. The whole map selects, because it is one group.
2. Shape Format → Group → Ungroup, or right-click → Group → Ungroup.
3. Every area becomes its own shape, and the group's single outline is replaced by the individual outlines.

Nothing moves during this step. The shapes keep the fill, the outline and the position they had inside the group, which is why ungrouping is safe to do on a slide that already looks finished.

When Ungroup is grayed out

• The object is a picture. Convert it, or start from a file that has shapes in it.
• A single shape is selected, not a group. One object has nothing to ungroup.
• The slide is in protected view. A file opened from an email attachment stays read-only until Enable Editing is clicked.
• The selection includes something ungroupable, such as a chart or a table. Select the map alone.

Editing three thousand shapes without clicking each one

A national county map is 3,225 shapes. No amount of care makes clicking them viable, and the tool built for this is the Selection Pane: Home → Select → Selection Pane. It lists every object on the slide by name, in stacking order, with an eye icon to hide it.

Names are what make the list usable. In a file built from official boundary data each shape carries the name of the area it draws — Cook County, Los Angeles County — rather than Freeform 1284, so the pane can be searched by typing. Select a name, apply a fill, and the shape changes on the slide behind the pane. Ctrl-click adds to the selection, which is how a set of counties becomes one fill operation.

Putting it back together

Once the map is positioned and colored, select all of its shapes and group them again. A group scales and moves as one object, which prevents the failure this whole exercise invites: nudging a map by dragging one county and leaving a hairline gap in the middle of a state.

What to check before presenting

• Labels sit above the fills. If text is hidden behind a shape, bring it to the front rather than deleting it.
• Nothing is left selected. A stray selection outline reads as a border on the map when projected.
• The file still opens quickly. Ungrouping adds no weight; deleting the slides you are not using removes it.

$19.99 per template, one-time, with a refund window of 14 days. Browse the templates.

Questions