Today we will look at how you use the Selection and Visibility Pane to edit the contents of a presentation. The first thing we need to do is to show the Selection Pane. You can do this in PowerPoint and Excel from the Select Dropdown in the Editing Group on the Home Tab:

Screenshot showing how to launch the pane.

I recommend right clicking the button and adding a shortcut to the Quick Access Toolbar. It will save you time if you use the feature a lot. Now that we have the pane up, I wanted to point out a few things:

Screenshot demonstrating Selection Pane usage
  1. The pane starts with Keyboard Focus. This means that keyboard presses are interpreted by the pane as commands. The pane indicates this with the highlight color in the title.
  2. The pane allows you to edit the name of the selected or focused shape. Click on a selected shape to edit its name. Press F2 to edit the name of the currently focused shape. Keyboard focus is indicated with a dotted box around a non-selected shape and with an additional highlight on a selected shape.
  3. The selected shapes do not change when editing. In this example, the Title shape was selected and I clicked on it in the pane to edit its name.
  4. This is the Selection Pane icon in the ribbon when added to the QAT. Note that when the Selection Pane is visible, it is highlighted.

Using the pane, we can add helpful names to otherwise meaningless shape names and groups. This helps give us an alternate way to communicate about a drawing. The shapes in the pane appear on top of the shapes listed below them. Groups may contain other groups. You may not select a group which is not top-level, but you may rename it by setting keyboard focus to the inner shape and pressing F2. In the following drawing, we have a lightning bolt and a house. The house is made up of a Roof, a Chimney, a Wall, and a Door.

Screenshot demonstrating using the Selection Pane to add meaning to shapes

In addition to giving meaning to shapes in a drawing, the Selection Pane also helps you work with complex drawing consisting of overlapping shapes. It enables you to hide the shapes and all of their attached animation UI so that you can work on shapes underneath with the mouse. In the screenshot below, we have used the Selection Pane in addition to the Custom Animation Pane to create an animation which has several portions of a "Curtain" slide off the screen to reveal a hidden message.

Screenshot showing how to select buried shapes.

Now we'll hide a few shapes (Note that Beta 2 had some bugs in this area. This screenshot was produced in a later build.):

Screenshot showing how to hide shapes and animations.
  1. The I shape has keyboard focus in the Selection Pane and is selected as well.
  2. The list of effects in the timeline does not show hidden shapes. Animations on hidden shapes will not play back in slide show or in preview.
  3. The OOUI as well as the Motion Paths are not shown for hidden shapes.

The full list of keyboard shortcuts is:

Keys Action
Up / Down Arrows Change keyboard focus to next / previous shape

Shift + Up / Down Arrows

 Change focus and select new focused shape (if possible)
Space / Enter Select focused shape (if possible)
Shift + Space / Enter Add focused shape to selection (if possible)
Ctrl + Shift + S (for "Show") Toggle Visibility
Ctrl + Shift + F (for "Forward") Move selected shapes forward
Ctrl + Shift + B (for "Backward") Move selected shapes backward
F2 Enter rename shape / editing mode
Enter (in editing mode) Accept new shape name (if valid)
Escape (in editing mode) Cancel editing shape name
Alt + Shift + 1 Collapse all groups
Alt + Shift + 9 Exapnd all groups
Left / Right Arrows Collapse/Expand focused group
Tab / Shift + Tab Cycle through Selection Pane controls
Escape Return keyboard focus to document editing window
F6 / Shift + F6 Cycle through next / previous pane
Any key not handled in the Selection Pane Return keyboard focus to document editing window and press the key.

Finally, I just wanted to say that this feature is fully accessible to screen readers and Braille readers via Microsoft's Active Accessibility (see also here), and it replaces the functionality of the Select Multiple Objects dialog as the preferred way for visually impaired people to interact with multiple shapes in PowerPoint and Excel documents. Exposing these shape names to seeing users and encouraging them to add meanings to these names helps everyone to communicate more effectively.

This posting is provided "AS-IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.