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![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Hey! I have a textbox on my PowerPoint slide. I want to make this textbox not be editable by the user. I do not want to move this to the slide master (I am aware this will work but this causes other problems for our project). So are there any properties I can set or methods available for a textbox / shape that can allow it to be changed to not editable while the user is in slide design view? Perhaps something in .TextFrame.TextRange; or may you have any other solutions on how to do this? Thank you in advance and I really appreciate the guidance.
A family of Microsoft presentation graphics products that offer tools for creating presentations and adding graphic effects like multimedia objects and special effects with text.
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Answer accepted by question author
it does not lock Text Edit as standard.
When you set the built in Locked flag the XML looks like this
To lock textEdit you would have to manually edit it
Obviously there is a learning curve to do the edit but you sound pretty knowledgeable.
Sadly there are still ways to edit the text even with the lock set but it is at least more di9fficult
It's possible to lock graphics and text boxes by editing the XML of the slide. Here is Microsoft's page with C# code. And here's my how-to article on how it's done manually: OOXML Hacking: Locking Graphics
Understood, this works!! Thank you!
Hi Steve, unfortunately the locked property still allows the user to edit the text. It just prevents the user from moving the shape around.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(108.80000000000001, 6%, 20%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3ESR%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
This won't work in the non-subscription versions of Office, as I recall, but if you have Office 365, shapes in PowerPoint have a .Locked property. Set that to true and the shape will be unselectable.