Every shape in PowerPoint can be locked in ten different ways: disallow movement, resizing, rotation, selection, text editing, and more. But the PowerPoint UI barely exposes any of them. In this post I show where those locks live in the PPTX XML, how Designer and the built-in unlock option use them, and how I built an app to control them individually.

The SmartArt gallery in PowerPoint for the desktop does not show every layout that exists. Some only appear through Designer suggestions, and others are tucked away in the web version of PowerPoint. In this post I catalog every layout I have found that is missing from the desktop SmartArt menu, show what each one looks like, and provide a downloadable PPTX file with copy-and-paste-ready diagrams.