The Sisyphus Comments

PowerPoint – Use [Ctrl]A to Select All Objects in Different Ways

Clicking and dragging the Select Objects pointer in a big rectangle over your slide selects everything within that area. But you can accomplish the same task by pressing [Ctrl]A ([command]A in v. X). This trick works not only for selecting everything on a slide in the Slides tab in Normal view, but also selects all slides in Slide Sorter view, and all text in the presentation in Outline view.