I’m putting together a PowerPoint 2007 slide at the moment and wanted to add some custom animation to ensure objects in a diagram appear one at a time. Simple enough, but there are 20 odd pictures on the slide and having them all with generic names like “Picture 1”, “Picture 2”, “Picture 3” etc. was annoying me.
I know that if I ever want to change the order for whatever reason it will just be irritating, so I wanted to change the names but couldn’t see an obvious way to do this (in other words, right-clicking didn’t work! Worse, there was nothing in the context-speicfic “Format” panel of the ribbon). What to do.
It took some slightly less than intuitive Googling but I found Ellen Finkelstein’s post on her PowerPoint Tips blog: “The wonderful Selection pane lets you easily hide objects, select them and even rename them” – which did exactly what I wanted. Cheers Ellen.
You just need to go to the Home tab -> Editing panel and choose Selection -> Selection Pane. Then you can just edit the names of any objects on the slide. Easy.
PS – I haven’t got PowerPoint 2010 to verify this yet so let me know if something similar works there.
