Pinning down PowerPoint placeholder names for more accessible presentations

Placeholders in PowerPoint are great for providing a way for users to add content to well-designed masters. They form part of a layout and keep content in the right place on a slide. But sometimes, you want the names you see in the Selection Pane in the slide to follow what you set in the master. We’re going to unravel a bit of PowerPoint history and find a solution to this conundrum in the process, ultimately helping you succeed in your next accessible Section 508 presentation project.

Let’s start with an example.

In the first screenshot below you can see a slide from the default Microsoft Office template for PowerPoint. Make a mental note of the placeholder names in the Selection pane on the right. In the second screenshot, you can see the corresponding layout in the Slide Master view. Again, look at the placeholder names. They’re different!

What’s the reason for this?

Well, in a galaxy far far way, there once lived a very old version of PowerPoint called Obi Wan 2003 in which there was no Selection pane. So users couldn’t even see the shape name, let alone edit it. Microsoft used the shape name to uniquely identify each shape on the slide to facilitate various features – so every name had to be different, hence the numerical suffixes. Then came along the shiny new Selection pane in PowerPoint 2007 and users could name shapes however they wanted, including using the same name. So Microsoft introduced the shape ID property, which retains the need to be unique, but is inaccessible to people anywhere in the user interface. But they left behind the weird numbering system of placeholders.

If all this talk about masters and layouts sounds like gibberish then go and read our post on How to create PowerPoint templates that work before coming back to this post!

Why do you care?

We hear the word on the street is that the world has moved on significantly since 2007 and a relatively new set of functionality in PowerPoint falls in the category of Accessibility features. One of them is the Reading Order pane and along with it, the pre-existing Selection pane is often used by people with limited vision and hearing to identify objects on the slide. Seeing a bunch of “Text Placeholder XYZ” names isn’t very helpful. Let’s go back to the example above and think about how you could make the placeholder names more accessible i.e. descriptive, for a Section 508 compliant project:

Now these names make a whole lot more sense and actually add value to the reader/listener. You can also see the corresponding useful names in the Reading Order pane, which is simply the reverse order of the Selection pane or Z-Order for the objects on the slide.

But that won’t work!

And you’d be absolutely right to throw this back in my face because every time PowerPoint creates a new slide, it doesn’t use the placeholder names from the corresponding layout and instead, makes stuff up like “Text Placeholder 33”. The same happens when you use the the Reset Slide feature and have one or more empty placeholders on a slide. Isn’t Microsoft infuriating… sometimes?!

So we have a free solution

One of our VBA creative thinkers worked with fellow MVP, Sandy Johnson at Presentation Wiz, on this problem and we decided that the only way to solve it was through the use of an add-in. This isn’t going to be for everybody because of various anti-productivity departments in various organisations (otherwise known as IT departments!). But if you’re able and allowed to install things, this could be a game changer for you. This very light-weight add-in works for PowerPoint on both Windows and macOS and is completely free for you to use and share.

Not only will this add-in help eliminate Microsoft’s ad hoc placeholder names, it will help you maintain all custom naming changes – from master to selection pane to the reading order pane.

What does it do?

Put very simply, it just copies the names of the placeholders from the slide master’s layout to your slide. This happens on several actions as follows:

1. When you insert a new slide.
2. When you open the Selection pane.
3. When you navigate between slides.

There are some special cases where it will not rename:

1. When the name of the placeholder on the slide starts with the special Morph bang bang (!!) prefix – sign up to our free masterclasses to learn about Morph.
2. When the name of the placeholder on the master starts with one of the standard names i.e. Title, Subtitle, Content, Footer etc. which indicates that you’ve not renamed them.

We really wanted to add another action so that it copies the names when you click the Reset Slide button. Unfortunately, again due to some bizarre Microsoft design choices, the three places you can access that feature don’t behave in exactly the same way. But you can simply toggle the Selection Pane off and on again (using Alt+F10) on a Windows PC to force the names to get updated.

The other feature worth noting is that it adds this button to the ribbon when you’re in the Slide Master View:

One click and all those pesky numerical suffixes are removed, from every layout, in every master, quicker than you can blink. Cool right? You can also turn the auto renaming off and on from here.

Is that all you need to know?

There’s one thing to add. If you don’t have the add-in, PowerPoint will continue to do it’s silly random renaming thing, even after you send a file to someone without the add-in. That’s fine if you’re sending a finished deck to your audience but not so fine if you’re sending a template or a deck in which other people need to create content. But feel free to point them to this page to download the add-in for themselves.

How to install it

It’s really easy to install and activate the add-in in PowerPoint as follows:

1. Download the PPAM add-in from here.
2. For Windows, open Windows File Explorer and copy paste this location into the address bar: %AppData%\Microsoft\Addins
3. For macOS, open Finder and navigate to this location:
   ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/Add-ins
4. Move the PPAM file you downloaded in step 1 to the folder above.
5. Start PowerPoint.
6. For Windows:
   • Navigate to File / Options / Add-ins
   • Change the Manage drop down to PowerPoint Add-ins and click the Go button.
   • Click the Add New… button and select the PPAM file downloaded above.
   • Click Open, followed by Close.
7. For macOS:
   • In the main menu bar, click Tools / PowerPoint Add-ins…
   • Click the [+] button and navigate to the folder above.
   • Click Open, followed by OK.

That’s all there is to it! Happy placeholder renaming. May the force of presentations be with you and accessible – on all fronts. If you’re looking for more changes to make your presentation more accessible, we’ve a got few blog posts that you’ll want to check out: 7 steps towards presenting inclusively, 5 tips for more accessible presentations, Free color contrast checker for PowerPoint.