Group Presentation Shapes with Python

Overview

Grouping shapes allows you to treat multiple drawing objects as a single unit so you can move, resize, format, and transform them together. With Aspose.Slides for Python, you can create a GroupShape, add and arrange child shapes inside it, and persist the result to PPTX. This article demonstrates how to add a group shape on a slide and how to access accessibility metadata such as Alt Text from shapes within the group, enabling cleaner structure and richer, more maintainable presentations.

Add Group Shapes

Aspose.Slides supports working with group shapes on a slide. This feature lets you build richer presentations by treating multiple shapes as a single object. You can add new group shapes, access existing ones, populate them with child shapes, and read or modify any of their properties. To add a group shape to a slide:

1. Create an instance of the Presentation class.
2. Get a reference to a slide by index.
3. Add a GroupShape to the slide.
4. Add shapes to the new group shape.
5. Save the modified presentation as a PPTX file.

The example below shows how to add a group shape to a slide.

import aspose.slides as slides

# Instantiate the Presentation class.
with slides.Presentation() as presentation:
    # Get the first slide.
    slide = presentation.slides[0]

    # Add a group shape to the slide.
    group_shape = slide.shapes.add_group_shape()

    # Add shapes inside the group shape.
    group_shape.shapes.add_auto_shape(slides.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, 300, 100, 100, 100)
    group_shape.shapes.add_auto_shape(slides.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, 500, 100, 100, 100)
    group_shape.shapes.add_auto_shape(slides.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, 300, 300, 100, 100)
    group_shape.shapes.add_auto_shape(slides.ShapeType.RECTANGLE, 500, 300, 100, 100)

    # Write the PPTX file to disk.
    presentation.save("group_shape.pptx", slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)

Access the Alt Text Property

This section explains how to read the Alt Text of shapes contained within a group shape on a slide using Aspose.Slides. To access the Alt Text of the shapes:

1. Instantiate the Presentation class to represent a PPTX file.
2. Obtain a reference to the slide by its index.
3. Access the slide’s shapes collection.
4. Access the GroupShape.
5. Read the Alt Text property.

The example below retrieves the Alt Text of shapes contained within group shapes.

import aspose.slides as slides

# Instantiate the Presentation class to open the PPTX file.
with slides.Presentation("group_shape.pptx") as presentation:
    # Get the first slide.
    slide = presentation.slides[0]

    for shape in slide.shapes:
        if isinstance(shape, slides.GroupShape):
            # Access the group shape.
            for child_shape in shape.shapes:
                # Access the Alt Text property.
                print(child_shape.alternative_text)