Thanks, Bob.

I didn't know there is a dialog box where I can pick shapes by name.
Since it seems that I cannot arrange the predefined names differently I
still have to go thru the whole document visually (around 200 pages)
and find all shapes with a certain format. And I have to do this all
over again if I want to change the overall layout of my document.
I thought there was a trick to define something like a format style for
shapes, which I can change and for example the corresponding
rectangles immediately get more 3D-depth.

Alternatively forming groups of shapes would be fine, but seems not to
extend beyond a single page.

I already considered writing a makro which picks up all similar shapes
and reformats them.

Werner