Thanks again Bob,

one more of these wonderful tricks, the Format - Autoform - Web
feature! I tested it and will setup an infrastructure in my document by
marking the template for every type of shape with a specific comment.
Then I can easily select them by name in the multiple objects dialog
box and change their properties. And if I get tired of selecting
manually I have seen the AlternativeText property in the VB object
model, so that I might be able to select them by a macro.

I suppose the character and paragraph styles discussed by Nick and Jay
won't help me because I cannot store the advanced graphical settings
(shadow depth etc.) in them.

Thanks again Werner