by AJ George 
Have you ever been working on a slide with text, images, animations and some shapes... and then "lost" something? Perhaps you overlapped two objects and couldn't see one of them? Or maybe it was a teensy tiny little part to a whole that you hadn't grouped to the whole? What about this: you are animating several different shapes on a slide, but on the animation pane they all have names like "Rectangle 2." As you work it's hard for you to keep straight which rectangle is which (how are you supposed to remember which Rectangle is 2 and which one is 47??). Would you be super excited to learn that there is a simple solution to all of this?
From the PowerPoint ribbon, choose Home > Arrange > Selection Pane.
The Selection and Visibility pane will appear to the right. Here you will see a list of every object on the slide and next to it a clickable eyeball to indicate whether or not the object is hidden on the slide. (If you don't see the eyeballs, drag the pane out to the left to enlarge it until you do.)
When the eyeball is visible, the object is visible on the slide. Clicking the eyeball will make it disappear and will cause the corresponding object to be hidden (but not deleted) on the slide. This can be immensely helpful if you have several objects overlapping each other and you want to work with one of the objects that is not in front. By hiding any objects on top of it you can work as though they are not there and just unhide the objects when you are finished.
The Selection Pane can also be used to name each object with a more useful name than "Rectangle 2." Furthermore if you have several shapes that you will be grouping together into one shape, you can not only name the individual parts, but the whole group as well. Doing this as you work (and not after you have added all the objects) will save you a lot of confusion down the line and will really clean up your workflow.
So, let's say you have a tiny hourglass image that appears first on your slide before anything else. You have everything animated so that it appears after the hourglass and piles in on top of where the hourglass once was. After you are finished with the slide, you realize that the hourglass was orange and you wanted to make it blue. You could take the time to rearrange the order of the objects on the slide and sift through all the work you have done. OR, you could glance over to your Selection Pane, click the Hide All button, locate the hourglass (that you have thoughtfully already named "hourglass") on the selection pane, click the box next to it (causing the eyeball to appear and the object to show on the slide), make your edits quickly, and then click the Show All button to bring everything else back. Much faster!
About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."
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