Editing inside groups

If you want to edit the objects inside a group, there are broadly two ways to approach this. You can either select the objects inside the group and work on them directly in your document, or you can double click on the group to open its contents in a separate document view.

Selecting inside

If you hold down Ctrl and click on an object in the Selector tool, that object will be selected even if it's inside one or more groups. That's called a "select inside" operation. Also some tools will let you directly select objects relevant to them inside groups, just by clicking on them. For example in the Photo Tool you can just click on a photo to select it, even if it's in a group.

It is just as easy to replace symbols which are part of a group as well, either with a replacement symbol or an image, just right-click on the symbol and select Replace from the context menu.

Editing group contents

If you want to edit several objects inside a group, it can get tedious having to keep Ctrl+clicking on each one first. So instead you can instantly open the group's contents in a separate sub-document view, to make editing much easier.

Double click on a group and a new document view opens (or right click on it and choose Open from the context menu). It contains only the contents of the group and not the group itself, so you can select all the direct children of the group just by clicking on them. You can also draw new objects and these will be added to the group when you save your changes back. Since the sub-document contains only the contents of the group, you won't see the effects of any group attributes in the sub-document view.

Once you're done editing the group, hit "Ctrl + S" to instantly close the sub-document view and save your changes back to the parent document. Or you can close the view using the close button in the top right of the window, just as you close ordinary documents, and you'll be prompted to save or discard any changes you've made.

If the group you are editing contains other groups (because the parent document had multiple levels of nested groups) you can double-click on them to open those in a sub-document too.

Live Copies & Repeating Objects

You can edit inside a Live Copy just as if it was a normal group – just double click it to open in a sub-document view. As with all edits made to the objects inside a Live Copy, when you save the changes back, all copies of that Live Copy will be updated. And similarly you can edit a repeating object the same way.

Molds

You can edit the contents of a mold, which is something that is not possible using direct selection inside (molds do not allow objects inside them to become selected). Right click on the mold and choose Open mold from the context menu.

Limitations

Groups cannot contain layers and so if you introduce any layers while editing a group, those layers will be 'flattened' when you save the changes back to the parent document. In other words all the objects will be moved to the original single layer on save and any layer structure you introduced lost.

Similarly a group can't contain multiple pages and so any pages you add while editing will be ignored and lost when you save back – only the first page is relevant.

The Automatic Backup facility does not save modifications to open sub-documents. Only the parent main document is saved when a scheduled backup runs, in its current state without the unsaved group edits. For this reason it's recommended that you save group edits back to the parent document regularly.

If you close the program or shutdown Windows while you have group sub-documents open with unsaved changes, when you next start the program, the main document will be loaded and it will include all the group edits that were unsaved at the time of closure.