beamer: grouping elements together

I am using beamer for creating my presentation. Sometime I create elementary objects (like geometrical shapes and arrows) by using tikzpicture and I place them in the slide by using textblock.

I would like to know if there is a way of bonding different elements together (like text, equations and geometrical objects), so that I can move them easily around the slide as one piece.

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You can place them in a scope and give [shift={(x,y)}] option to the scope. –  percusse Jan 16 '13 at 0:07
I think you should go a little bit more in detail: how freely you want to move your elements? Do you want to reuse those grouped objects more than once? And why is textpos not longer sufficient? This could be related: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85269/… –  bloodworks Jan 16 '13 at 9:09

The way I go about this usually is to compile such elements in a separate file, creating a PDF file which I can then put into the presentation via \includegraphics. It's especially convenient if you reuse the same illustration made up by several components more than once.

My minimum template example for such a figure file is as follows:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage[graphics,tightpage,active]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\sffamily
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (0,0) circle (2cm);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}


The use of the preview package will crop the PDF to exactly the dimensions of the drawn picture. I am using \sffamily here because it mostly looks better for presentations, but depending on usage it could also be left out.

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