How do I select all the text for all the slides in PowerPoint all at once?

You can select all text as long as it is all in placeholders. View > Outline and select all text in the left pane. You will not see or be able to select text in shapes / textboxes etc.

Dear James Garner1,

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

As per your description, it seems that you want to select all test for all slides in PowerPoint all at once.

If the understanding above is right, as per the search and test in our side, we have not found an out of box way to achieve this in PowerPoint desktop app currently.

We'd recommend you open the file in PowerPoint > File > Export > Change file type > Save as Another File Type > Save as and choose PDF or Outline/RTF, and open the exported file to select all text as a workaround.

Meanwhile, personally, I completely agree with you, this is indeed a good addition to the current experience in PowerPoint in desktop app. We’d suggest you go to PowerPoint > Help > Send Feedback to send request for the feature to select all text for all slides in PowerPoint all at once.

Feedback submit by this way directly goes to the related team, this is the best way to let Word developers know your requirements and comments, help improve the product and make it better for you and others.

If our understanding of the scenario is not consistent with yours, please feel free to point it out.

Thanks for your cooperation and understanding! We hope you have a nice day, stay safe and healthy always.

Sincerely,

Rhoda | Microsoft Community Moderator

PowerPoint only allows you to select all shapes on a single slide, not on more than one slide at a time.

But tell us what you want to accomplish by selecting all text. There might be another way to get there.

You can only select what's on the current slide or notes page, so there's no direct way to do this.

But there's a VBA macro here that will extract all the text to a text file. https://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00274_Export_Text_to_a_text_file-extract_text_from_PowerPoint-Mac_or_PC-.htm

You could run that, open the file containing the extracted text and copy/paste it back onto a slide in PPT, then create your word cloud from that.

Changing language in powerpoint, does not change for text within an object. If powerpoint offered the capability of selecting text on all slides, it would help as a work around for my original problem.