The Selection Pane

New to Excel 2007, unless JP corrects me, is the Picture Selection Pane.

This is a neat little tool which allows quick sorting and editing of the visibility of pictures and other objects on a worksheet. Those other objects includes Charts, Shapes, Word Art, Text Boxes, Pictures and other embedded objects.

Earlier this week on the Chandoo.org/Forums, Ankit asked a question about un-hiding pictures that seemed to disappear from his worksheet.

I responded with a little bit of VBA code which he was able to use to make all his pictures visible.

Sub unhide_pics()
  Set DrwObj = ActiveSheet.DrawingObjects
  For Each Pict In DrwObj
    Pict.Visible = True 'change to False to hide
  Next
End Sub

I later realized that had Ankir been using Excel 2007/10 he could have solved his problem without the need for any code.

How ?

Use the Selection Pane.

Goto a page with an object, hidden or not

Goto the Page Layout, Selection Pane tab.

What Can I Do ?

In the selection pane window you will see a list of objects that are on your worksheet. The list shows visible and non-visible (Hidden) objects.

Visibility

Each Object has a small picture beside it showing either an Eye (Visible) or a Window (see through), this indicates the visible status.

Click on an eye to hide an object,

Click on a blank pane to unhide the object

Depth Order

The location of the objects in the list also shows the position in the Depth Field of the objects. That is Objects at the top of the list are in front of those objects below it in the list.

You can move objects up or down using the re-order buttons which moves objects closer to the front or rear of other objects.

Show All/Hide All

Click on the Show All/Hide All buttons to do exactly that.

Rename Objects

Click on the name of the object and type a new name

Advanced Use

Hold Ctrl and Click on several objects in the selection pane to add them to your selection

The selected objects are highlighted in the selection pane

Right click on the objects to Group/Ungroup them

Grouped Objects are shown in the selection Pane as a group

The group can be hidden/shown or individual members of the group can be hidden/shown

Uses:

Cleanup Web Copy/Paste

If you have ever selected a large amount of text from a web site and pasted it into Excel, you will have inevitably collected several graphical objects along the way, some visible and some hidden

Use the selection Pane to select them all at once and press delete

Change Company Logos

You may have a report which you generate for differing companies

Install all the logos and Hide/Show as required.

Look for Missing Links

I have seen Excel workbooks where people have an external link and they cannot find it.

Links can be attached to Drawing Objects etc and these may be hidden.

The Selection Pane is a quick way to search for those objects without code

Let us know about your object handling problems and how you solved them in the comments below:

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