Selecting Objects

In the previous two lessons, you learned about inserting clip art, image files, sound files, and movie files onto the slides of your PowerPoint presentation. Any type of special content that you place on a slide is called an object. In addition to the object types just listed, objects could also be items from other Office applications. For example, you could create an object on a slide that is actually an Excel worksheet or chart (for more about sharing information between Office applications, see Lesson 7, "Sharing Office Application Data," in Part 1, "Office Introduction and Shared Features," of this book.

After you select an object, you can do all kinds of things to it, such as copying, moving, deleting, or resizing it. The following is a review of ways you can select objects on a PowerPoint slide:

• To select a single object, click it. (If you click text, a frame appears around the text. Click the frame to select the text object.)

• To select more than one object, hold down the Ctrl or Shift key while clicking each object. Handles appear around the selected objects, as shown in Figure 11.1 (this temporarily groups the objects so that you can move them all simultaneously on the slide).

  Figure 11.1. You can select multiple objects on a slide.

  

• To deselect selected objects, click anywhere outside the selected object or objects.

Select Objects Tool Use the Select Objects tool on the Drawing toolbar to drag a selection box around several objects you want to select. When you release the mouse button, PowerPoint selects all the objects inside the box.