Soft Groups
And, from the progam's Help: Soft Groups
Ordinary Groups as described in "Grouping and ungrouping objects" {make sure that you read this too} sit on a single layer, they cannot span layers. Soft Groups are an alternative way of linking objects together where the objects can be across several different layers.
Selecting one member of a Soft Group also selects all other members of the same Soft Group – even members that are on invisible or locked layers. This means when you delete, move, rotate or otherwise transform one member of a Soft Group, all the other members are similarly modified.
The status line indicates when a Soft Group is selected.
Soft Groups are useful for keeping closely related objects together. For example the MouseOff and MouseOver states of a web button are Soft Grouped together, so that if one state is moved or transformed, so is the other state.
Creating Soft Groups
To create a Soft Group, select all the objects that are to be included in it and then choose "Arrange->Apply soft group" (or press "Ctrl+Alt+G"). Note that if the Soft Group is to include members on invisible or locked layers, you'll need to make those layers temporarily visible and editable using the Layer Gallery in order to select the objects and Soft Group them.
An object cannot be a member of more than one Soft Group and Soft Groups cannot be nested (soft groups as members of souft groups).
Removing Soft Groups
To disband a Soft Group, select it and choose "Arrange->Remove soft group" (or press "Ctrl+Alt+U"). The objects don't get deleted, they are just no longer linked together by a Soft Group.
Text Synchronisation
Any text objects which have the same text value and which are members of the same Soft Group are kept synchronized if any of those text objects are edited. So change the text in one object and any other text objects that had the exact same characters will also be changed to match. Only the text value itself if synchronized, so different text objects can have different sizes, fonts and text attributes.
Text sychronisation using Soft Groups is useful where a label is duplicated in several places, perhaps in different styles and you want each object to show the same label.
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