- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how to align
a group of objects to the artboard.
Now, let's say, for example, I want to take
these four squares right here, and I want
to exactly center them on the artboard.
I could take advantage of that center guides trick.
To refresh your memory on that one,
I'll go ahead and press the V key to switch back
to the black arrow tool, and now I'll press
Control + R, or Command + R on the Mac, in order
to bring up the rulers, and I'll press the control key,
or the command key on the Mac, and I'll drag
from the intersection of the two rulers
in the upper left corner of the window,
in order to drag out two guides at the same time.
Now, I'll press Control + R, or Command + R on the Mac,
in order to hide the rulers,
then I'll go up to the View Menu, choose Guides,
and choose the Lock Guides command to turn it off,
and then, just go ahead and marquee these two guides
like so, and go up to the Align icon,
up here in the Control Panel.
Click on it, and choose Align To Artboard.
Then go ahead and click on each of these center icons,
which includes Horizontal Align Center,
and then click on Vertical Align Center,
and you will now center your guides,
after which point, you probably want to go to the View menu,
choose Guides once again, and this time
choose Lock Guides to turn it back on.
All right, now we can go ahead and partially marquee
these four squares right here, and I can just drag them
by their sheared center point until I snap
those anchor points into alignment
with the intersection of the two guide lines.
So that's one way to work,
and I am a big fan of center guides.
I find them useful, especially when setting up documents,
but in this particular case, there's an easier way to work.
So I'm gonna go up to the File menu
and choose the Revert command in order to revert
to the saved version of the document.
I'll go ahead and click the Revert button as well.
Now what I'm gonna do is partially marquee these squares
once again, in order to select all four of them.
You'll notice, by the way, the Align icon now reads
Align To Artboard, so it remembers your last setting.
What I should be able to do is just center these squares
to the artboard by first clicking on Horizontal Align Center
and then clicking on Vertical Align Center,
but you can see that this isn't working,
and that's because each one of the squares
is getting centered independently
because they're all independent path outlines.
If you want to center them as a group,
then you need to put them in some kind of container.
For example, if they all share the same fill color,
then I can combine them into a compound path,
but in my case, we've got two different colors going
so I'm going to group them.
I'll go ahead and press Control + Z,
or Command + Z on the Mac,
a couple of times to re-establish the relative positioning,
then I'll go up to the Object menu
and choose the Group command, or, of course,
you could press Control + G here on a PC,
or Command + G on the Mac,
and then click on Horizontal Align Center,
followed by Vertical Align Center,
and you will have aligned that entire block of squares
to the exact center of the artboard.
And that's how you align a group of objects to the artboard
here inside Illustrator.