Feature Request: General listing that matches Selection Pane

[MCM-Math]

I've looked through the documentation and the options, and there doesn't seem to be a general listing for elements of a slide that are named on the Selection Pane. There are ways to reference pre-existing placeholders from the Slide Master on a given slide, but no general listing for all elements that would fall under the Selection Pane, including those that may not be inserted into one of those placeholders.

It would be very useful for updating existing PowerPoints through this package to have one general listing that directly references each of the elements under the Selection Pane by name.

[mszbot]

sounds like you want a list of shape names on a given slide?

if so, why not just create a dict yourself and store all the shape names in it?

[MCM-Math]

There are multiple placeholders/shapes/etc. that seem to be scattered throughout the structures, and the documentation doesn't make it clear where exactly all of the parts are, and it would be useful to have something which structurally resembles the Selection Pane in terms of being able to find the parts easily.

I've been trying to make a dict for all the parts, but I haven't been able to find all of the parts, so it would be useful to have something which has a better interface. I'm doing this for work, and I'm trying to evaluate how useful this package would be, not just in terms of being able to generate PowerPoints, but also in terms of ease-of-use and maintainability for others who would use it. This package would be more practical if I could point to the code, and then to the PowerPoint, and be more easily able to say "This part in the code refers to this part of the PowerPoint."

[mszbot]

Sounds like you want to build some sort of interface/gui between this library and powerpoint.

I usually open powerpoint, open the selection pane, select the shape I'm interested, note down the shape's name, then I access that shape in python-pptx by name.