Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
The other day I was working on some slides for a user group presentation when I hit an issue. PowerPoint's "random slide design" tool had thrown up a style I liked and wanted to reuse. But there were things it added to the slide I could not select. And hence I couldn't see a way to copy them so different slide types could share the same look. It took me a while to work out how to sort this, so it needs writing down so I can remember for next time...
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If you create an empty slide and use PowerPoint's Designer feature, you can get it to give you an assortment of potential looks for the slide. For example, if I pick a random one I get:
But when you examine that slide you'll fine only some bits are editable. On the one above, the text-areas work, and you can select the background image of the shelf and pencils. But you cannot select or interact with that orange border object.
So how can you replicate this look on a slide with a different template if you can't select the Designer's visuals to copy them?
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The internet was no help here - none of my search queries returned anything other than "use the Slide Background options" or "open the slide master" and neither of those was the solution here. But the classic technique of "click all the things and see what happens!" did eventually solve this for me.
The answer is that you need to select the "Arrange" dropdown (which may be hidden under the "Drawing" dropdown if your window is small) and then pick "Selection Pane":
That opens a new fly-out which lists all of the elements of your drawing. With a little fiddling (and judicious clicking of the "visible" icon here - with it's sort-of eye shape) you can work out which line matches with which item in your slide. And you can see that some of these items are marked as "locked":
So the answer to being able to select & copy any of these bits added by the Designer is to unlock them here by clicking the little padlock icon, and then they will be selectable and you can work with them as normal drawing items.
Simple when you know how...
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