How do you lock elements in a Powerpoint page so they cant be moved?

>> wouldn't it be so cool if i could have a slide where the size is locked, the font inside the box is defined, and locked, indentation is defined, and when i dump text, then it simply shows up formatted according to the slide?

I couldn't agree more.  But the two of us agreeing here won't move MS Mountain.  As has been suggested, it's important to make a very precise case for what you want on the Mac and Windows desktop sections of https://powerpoint.uservoice.com/ if you haven't already, or if you have, post a link to your request here so that others can upvote it.  I'll be first in line.

I truly think truly the point is missed. Whereas the products as a whole is quite sophisticated (tens of thousands of features), the fact is that IMO (and other people) basic things don't work.

I work for a large company where we already have dedicated master slides, macros, dedicated fonts etc, but the reality is that expecting all ICs to do the work right (checking fonts, graphics) is NOT the best use of their time. We rather have ENG experts, or strategists worry about their materials rather than PPT... but lets face it the cleanliness of the slides does matter. Here is a quick scenario... someone from China sends you excel data that you need to quickly paste into a slide. first depending on how you paste (there is tons of ways), then the format may change altogether, maybe the font will change, but not the font size. Maybe the paragraph will retain features, maybe it wont. Typically we waste tons of hours copying into notepad to remove "some" formatting and then paste to PPT., Likewise, depending on how accurate your clicking is, then you may accidentally lose the alignment of a couple of boxes.. now to fix that you have to google the solution (cuz lets face it google has way more info that MS KB anytime), an Again, point i was making is that

wouldn't it be so cool if i could have a slide where the size is locked, the font inside the box is defined, and locked, indentation is defined, and when i dump text, then it simply shows up formatted according to the slide?

Every presentation would now look professional, clean, not to mention that you wont need to squint depending on who did the slides.. (again lets face it that people do slides in their laptops, but present on a projector.....)

just ranting at this point

I don't know what you mean by the undefined "think this." Not being clairvoyant is a fault that I freely admit to. I didn't realize not being clairvoyant makes me a stupid person.

The reality is the PowerPoint simply does not have the feature you are asking for, and that using Themes is currently the best you can do.

There is a suggestion forum that is read by and responded to by Microsoft. This topic exists, but at the moment it has only 10 votes, which suggests to Microsoft that this is not an important issue. You can boost the suggestion by voting for it here:

Locking place, size of text boxes should available, as well as locked font attributes.

In PowerPoint for Windows, this does not appear to be a hot topic. Here's the topic in the Windows forum:

Lock placeholder and other objects to prevent modification

Please don't be too hard on those who are simply stating facts and offering suggestions on how to make the best of the situation as it exists.

I think you are really stupid if you think this. The main reason why people (especially designers) have to suffer using this awful application, is to give clients (who usually don´t know how to deal with that stuff) a presentation that they later can modify. And most of the times there are layout elements that have to be locked to prevent that those user accidentally move them. 

But I´m sure you are a Microsoft addicted and like all of them you don´t even understand the most simple things that users encounters in the everyday workflow. That´s why Microsoft application are so stupid, awful and absolutely unusfyl designwise !!!!