Synopsis
One of the most useful, yet hidden, features in PowerPoint is the Selection and Visibility Pane. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can use this feature to layer images within PowerPoint, as well as name the objects on the screen, which becomes very important for managing your slide elements for animations, layering, etc.
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Video Transcript
Hi this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt.com. Today I’m going to show you how to layer objects in PowerPoint using the selection and visibility pane. So working with layers, you may have before known that you can right click on any object to bring to front, or bring forward, and send it back.
Well when you start having a lot of objects on the screen, that’s really a difficult way to manage because you don’t know what it’s going in front or in back of when you do that. So the selection and visibility pane, which I have open here, and I’ll show you how to open it, is a really easy to control that.
Let me first… Let’s just show you how to go ahead and open that, and then I’ll show you what you can do. When this is closed, it’s actually it’s in a really annoying spot. You have to go to home, and then you have to go to arrange, and then selection pane. And I actually – I operate with this open almost all of the time when I’m working in PowerPoint.
So I add that to my quick access tool bar, and I have another video showing you how to set up your quick access toolbar. But then I could just click on it there. And one of the nice things is you can hide layers that you’re not working with. So this title that I had at the start of the video, might want to hide that, or this PowerPoint logo, I might want to hide that.
Now you’ll see… Let’s say that I wanted to bring this to the front, just I could order up and down here, move that up one layer, up another layer, back, oh. Actually I want the – the triangle to be on the top and the square to be between the two, there we go.
So it’s a really easy way to go to move layers up and down, and to hide layers you’re not working with. And this actually becomes really useful when you’re dealing with more complex slides. So this whole – look at this whole slide. And this is a scenario that I built.
You end up with all of these different things. If you don’t use the selection and visibility pane, good luck trying to order everything by sending it forward or back one at a time and not knowing what – what all is there.
So it’s crucial, so you can change any name of anything here, just double click within, you really want to name things as well. So, I’ll arrow down is that down arrow, my choice A button is going to be right here, this link box, yeah, there’s the link box. Is right there when you select on that – select on that image.
Or this underline, right? I name these things all the right way. And you can move things up and down, and again maybe I want to – I want to hide a certain section, I hide the background. So that’s useful. And then one bonus tip I’ll throw in here as well as, this is great for building what you’re slide is going to be, but once you get to the point where you know that you’re locking down the slide and only elements are going to change.
So maybe I know that everything is going to be the same here. So I want to highlight this whole box, but this question prompt is going to be different, I deselect that, now I can actually copy – actually I can right click it. And I can save that whole thing as a picture.
And I’m not going to save it right now, but you can save that. And then it becomes a single – it will just become a flattened layer, where it’s its own image. And then you can – you can drop that into say a slide master or something like that.
If you’re – you’re just changing certain elements of it. So that’s the – the bonus tip of the day. But, again, selection and visibility pane, it’s on home, under arrange, there it is, controls your layers, up and down, you can hide things with this little eyeball clicking on it, and I also recommend that you drop that you drop it on your quick access toolbar.
Hope you found that useful. Thanks so much.
