Collapse Groups with BrightSlide in PowerPoint’s Selection Pane

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The Selection Pane in PowerPoint is a tool that allows users to manage the selection and visibility of different objects on your slide. With the Selection Pane, users can easily reorder, rename, show or hide, or even lock and unlock objects on a slide.

However, what if your slides have many objects, and some of them are within groups? You can see how the Selection Pane looks for such a slide in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Selection Pane with groups

Now, if we manually collapse all groups, your Selection Pane may look more organized, as shown in Figure 2, below.

Figure 2: Selection Pane with groups collapsed

Yes, you must expand and collapse these groups manually, and that’s not easy when you have many slide objects in many groups. Worse, you may collapse all groups, and close your presentation. Open the presentation again, and all your collapsed groups are expanded! Yes, managing all these groups can be a nightmare within the Selection Pane.

Although PowerPoint does not remember the collapsed states of your Selection Pane, let’s now look at another related problem. To locate a particular slide object, you may end up scrolling all the time and may wonder why PowerPoint does not provide an easy option to collapse all groups in one go. Even better, why not offer the option to expand all groups that were previously collapsed? Such options can be useful when working with complex slide designs that contain many different objects. Our sample slide had over 500 slide objects in 6 groups, and there are slides that are much more populated and thus, complicated.

So, isn’t it awesome that BrightSlide, a free PowerPoint add-in from BrightCarbon has added a new feature that lets you collapse and expand your groups in the Selection Pane with one click? Yes, that’s true. You can find this option within the BrightSlide tab of the Ribbon, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Collapse and Expand groups in BrightSlide

When you click the Collapse Groups option, all groups in the Selection Pane for the active slide are collapsed. Similarly, when you click the Expand Groups option, all groups in the Selection Pane for the active slide are expanded. And it doesn’t matter if PowerPoint remembers the collapsed or expanded states because you can make that happen with one click.

There is also the ability to automatically collapse the Selection Pane so you don’t need to click a button at all when this feature is enabled. To enable this option, you access the BrightSlide tab of the Ribbon. Then click the Settings option to bring up a drop-down list, as shown in Figure 4, below. In this drop-down list, click the Passive Features option, shown highlighted in red within Figure 4.

Figure 4: Passive Features in BrightSlide

Doing so brings up the Passive Settings dialog box that you can see in Figure 5, below. In this dialog box, select the check mark next to the Automatically collapse groups in Selection Pane option, highlighted in red within Figure 5. Then, click the OK button.

Figure 5: Automatically collapse groups in Selection Pane

I spoke with Jamie Garroch of BrightCarbon about this super-useful feature.

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