Woohoo! A taskpane lists all objects on the slide. We can rename objects (and that name shows up in the custom animation taskpane, YEAH!), change the stacking order, and make the object visible or invisible in the pane.
Here’s how
1. Open the Selection pane from the Editing chunk at the far right of the Home ribbon. Or from the Arrange chunk on the Drawing Tools Format or Picture Tools Format ribbons.
2. Click once on an object in the taskpane. The object will be highlighted on the slide and on the taskpane.
3. Click again on the object in the taskpane, and the text will be highlighted so you can edit it.
4. Notice that pictures are automatically labeled with the name of the image.
Clicking the eye toggles visibility off and on.
When the eye is off, the object is invisible (hidden). When the eye is on, the object is visible.
You can see that I renamed “Rectangle 5” to “Textbox on left.”
5. Now let’s look at the Custom Animation Taskpane. Click the textbox on the left of the slide, click the Animations tab, and choose Custom Animation.
If you left the Selection and Visibility Taskpane open, the Custom Animation Taskpane will appear to its left.
6. Click Add Effect | Entrance | Checkerboard. The effect will appear in the Custom Animation Taskpane. (I dragged the left edge of the Custom Animation Taskpane in the image below to make it wider.) Go ahead and apply animations to all items on the slide.
7. As you can see in the image above, the items in the Custom Animation Taskpane pick up the names specified in the Selection and Visibility Taskpane. As with PPT 2003, the labels also pick up the text in the textbox.
Woohoo!
8. If you apply an animation to an object and then rename the object in the Selection and Visibility Taskpane, the new name may not show up in the Custom Animation Taskpane. If you click the Change button and use it to reapply the animation, the new name appears. At least, that’s what happens in Beta2, but it might be a bug, I don’t know.
