Articulate Storyline Essential Training

Create elearning with Storyline

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in the video
- [Daniel] Articulate Storyline 360 is the dominant tool for creating interactive e-
learning. I'm Daniel Brigham, and I've been working with Storyline since its release,
and I spent a decade as an Articulate superhero. In this course, I'll teach you the
most important features of Articulate storyline. For instance, we'll cover how to
insert common assets into storyline, whether that's text, audio, images, characters,
or video. We'll try our hand at triggers and layers so that you can build a tab and
slider interaction. We'll explore the latest interactive features such as 360 degree
image. We'll also learn how you can get the most out of Storyline's quizzing features.
I've designed this course around five e-learning best practices, best practices that
work.
When is Storyline the best tool?

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in the video
- There's a lot of e-learning tools out there. In which situations is Storyline the best?
I'll give you three. Situations in which you want to provide a consistently interactive
experience for the learner. Scenarios, drag-and-drops, sliders, scrolling, panels. If you
want to provide a lot of these experiences, Storyline is as good a tool as any. Another
situation in which Storyline is king is when you need complete control over graphic
elements and animations. I don't know about you, but it drives me nuts when I can't
set the specific color of a shape or set the animation of an object to a specific time
value to get the effect I'm going for. Whether it's your personality or the demands of
the project, if you need complete control over graphics and animations, Storyline is
for you. Finally, Storyline 360 is the go-to when you need to access a large library of
assets, stock photos, icons, illustrations, character packs, and so on. Warning, once
you get used to the convenience of such an all-in-one tool, it's really hard to go back.
Elearning best practices

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- For good reason, storyline is the leading tool with which to create e-learning. More
important, though, than knowing all the details of a tool is knowing the best practices
on how to use it. So here are the best practices that will frame the individual movies
of the course. Working efficiently. There are a gazillion little steps in creating an e-
learning course. So to build rapidly, you've got to work efficiently. Related to working
efficiently is leveraging the work of others. It used to be that e-learning developers
had to build their own templates and a lot of their own assets. That day has passed.
Another best practice that I'll stress is being consistent. A lot of the time, this means
templating your work when you can. In most situations, consistency is more
important than artistic flare. Creating visual interest will be another best practice of
ours. More than a great script or interaction, learners and stakeholders alike are
seduced by good-looking visuals. So if you want to be a good e-learning developer,
you got to develop this skill. And finally, varying the way you present material. If
there's one thing that's made me successful, it's this. You might as well use it too.
My aim for this course is depth, not breadth, and these best practices will help you
understand why we are covering the Storyline 360 elements that we do.
Accessing the trial version

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- [Instructor] Don't you want to be able to follow every move I make in this course?
Well, you can by downloading a free 30-day trial version of Storyline 360. So I am on
the articulate.com site. If you want to start that free trial, and I certainly hope you do,
put in your email, password, other information here, and then you'll select Start Free
Trial. Then, check your inbox for an email that asks you to verify your Articulate ID.
Now, make sure you write down your Articulate ID and password. You'll need it if you
want to visit the E-Learning Heroes Forum or download assets from the Articulate
site. Once you click on the link in the email, it will take you to an Articulate site, select
a dashboard, which I've done here, and then currently, you need to scroll down and
then you're looking for Storyline 360. Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. You'll
select Download Apps and then select Storyline, and then Start Download. So if you
want to follow every move I make in this course, download your free 30-day trial
version of Articulate Storyline.
Storyline views
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- [Presenter] When you're getting started with an intricate software, it's important to
know where you are in it. I think of Storyline as a house that has different spaces or
views and each space has a different function. So let me show you around. Here we
are in Story View, which is the default view when you open a project. Now, Story View
gives you the aerial view of the structure of your project, and speaking of structure,
storyline groups its individual slides, that you see here, into scenes. Story view is a
great place to copy, paste, create, or delete whole scenes or slides and you can get
started with that by right clicking on the scene and then you see here you could
create a new scene if you want to, you could insert a new slide from a whole bunch
of different places, you can cut slides within a scene and, say, paste them
somewhere else, you can copy slides, all sorts of things you can do. Story View is
also a great place to see the path the learner can take through the course. Now in
this course, and I'll scroll down a little bit, you can see it's linear. So we go from
scene one and then right into scene two and then into scene three. Story view is also
a great place to check your slide properties. I'll select slide 1.4, I'm going to draw
your attention over to the right here under Slide Properties, and you can tell on this
particular slide we have a previous button, a next button, we also have a seek bar on
that slide, a notes where you put the voiceover narration, generally, a resources tab, a
menu, et cetera. Now when I double click on a slide, I'm taken to Slide View. Slide
view is where you build your slides, interactions, and questions. I think of Slide View
as the main level of the house. The ribbon, as you will see, is quite familiar to
PowerPoint, so you're going to feel right at home there. I'll select the insert tab and I'll
point out some of the things you can insert on your slide. Whole bunch of content
from Content Library 360, all the media you'd probably want to insert pictures,
shapes, et cetera. All manner of text objects right there, and then interactive objects
that we'll definitely talk about throughout the course. Now the view tab, and I'll select
that, takes you to even more views and I want to talk about Slide Master. I think of
Slide Master as the attic. Each slide in your course is pulling from a layout in Slide
Master view. If you want to change the layout of a slide, you should come up to Slide
Master to make your tweaks rather than making your tweaks to individual slides in
Slide View and then copy and pasting. That way your slides in Slide View will look
uniform. Working from templates, which is what you're doing when you're working in
Slide Master, is a best practice in this course. And those are the key spaces or views
within Storyline. Each view has a function and the more acquainted you get with
them, the more efficient you'll be.
Setting slide size, colors, and fonts

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- [Instructor] A best practice of ours is being consistent, which more often than not is
applying some type of template to your work. In this movie, we'll do just that. We'll
set the slide size for our project and create a theme for our color palette and our
fonts. Now, I know full well that forming a template ain't the sexiest way to begin a
course, but I promise you if you spend some time upfront doing so, you'll be able to
move quicker later on with a more visually interesting product. So let's go ahead and
set the slide size. We'll go up to the design tab and we are in story view. We'll go over
to slide size setup, select it, and then from the presets you see four three here, we're
going to select the dropdown and go 16, nine. And then of course, you can tweak the
width and height of your Storyline file to your heart's delight, but I like what I've
chosen here. I was like, okay. And now we have a 16 by nine slide size. Really
important to set that slide size, especially if you're importing other Storyline files or
PowerPoint decks. Now let's set our color theme. I'm going to double click on this
slide from story view, which brings us to slide view. And this is the basic color
palette of Prime Energy, we have six colors with the RGB values indicated. Now to
set a color theme, we're going to go up to the top right here, colors all the way down
to the bottom, create new theme colors, and that's what we're doing. Now, there's a
lot of color options here and it can be overwhelming. I'll call out just some of the
biggies and know there's a downloadable Articulate job aid as to what all of these
colors refer to. Just search online for Storyline 360 theme colors, and you'll find that
job aid. Okay, let me insert a few of the more important color options. In particular,
accent one. So accent one, it's going to be a green. It's our primary color in our
palette, and it's also the default color of shapes. So let me put in those values. You
can do hex if you want to. I'm going to do RGB values and then you just plug them in.
Alright, we have our accent one, that green. Now accent two, it's going to be a teal
light color. That's going to be our secondary color. So I'll set that one. And now we
have our accent two color. Ctrl one is another important color. That's the hover color
for answer choices when you create a quiz question. So this kind of light sky blue
doesn't really work for my color palette, so I will change that as well. Yes, that control
one is going to work much better for us. Now I'll put in the rest of my accent colors.
And once you've filled in all your colors, you're going to want to name your color
theme at the top here, and then select okay. Now we'll go under colors again, we'll
find the theme we just created, Prime Energy, we'll right click and then we'll select
apply to all slides. So every slide that we create from here on out will have that color
theme, which is what we want. Now let's create a font theme, kind of the same
moves. We're going to go under fonts this time though, all the way down, create new
theme fonts, and then we'll select our heading font. And then we'll select our body
font. We'll give it a name and select save. And then same thing, we'll go under fonts.
We'll find our font. We'll right click and we'll select apply to all slides, and again, every
slide we create is now going to have that font theme. I know it takes a bit of time to
set your color and font themes. If you take the time however, you'll be able to crank
out a consistent product and quicker than most developers.
Importing a PowerPoint deck into Storyline

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- [Instructor] Let's be hones, a lot of the eLearning we're asked to build is, well, it's
pretty simple. So simple, that PowerPoint is the perfect tool. All we need to do is take
our branded PowerPoint template that our company uses, add some content, maybe
a few quiz questions, and call it good. The cool thing is that you can import that
PowerPoint deck right into Storyline, and let me show you how. So here we are with
pretty much a blank Storyline file, and the first thing I need to do is make sure the
slide size of my Storyline file is the same aspect ratio as my PowerPoint. So we'll go
up to the Design tab, Slide Size. My PowerPoint is not a 4:3, it's a 16:9, so I'll select
that, and great. Just making sure you know the size of the Storyline file is the same
size as the PowerPoint. Now, I want to import my PowerPoint deck. Again, I am in
story view, so I'll go to Home, New Slide, Import, and then PowerPoint. Select my
PowerPoint, select Open, and a few things I just want to point out here. The blue here
means it's going to import that slide. You can Select All or select None. Another
important thing is where you're going to import it. I want to import it into the current
scene, so I'll select that, and then select Import. And this may take a minute or two, it
really depends on how many slides you have. Very cool. Now, my PowerPoint deck is
in Storyline, and I can get busy editing or adding any content that I wanted to it. After
that, all I'd need to do is publish it and upload it to the LMS. Storyline plays very well
with PowerPoint, and inserting your branded deck into Storyline is probably the
easiest way to get started with eLearning.
Inserting a prebuilt slide template from the Content Library

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll insert a template from the articulate content library.
Graphic designers have created these templates, so why not make a few tweaks and
call them our own? Inserting such a template speaks to two core concepts of ours.
Leverage the work of others and be consistent. Templates, by the way, are the very
essence of consistency. So, I've opened up our mostly empty storyline file and I'll
download the content library template into it. Then we're going to tweak it using the
colors and font themes we created. All right, so we're in Story View to insert that
template, we will go up to a new slide, Content Library. So a lot of options here and I
almost wish I could take you back 10, 15 years to for you to appreciate what a gift all
of these templates are for everyone. But if we look to the left here, a lot of different
slide types. You have openings, titles and sections, various content slides, scenarios,
you know, quizzing options. And then also if we scroll down here, a lot of different
templates. So the Essence template, vitality template's kind of nice, it's dark. And
some of these subscription is required. And I'm using the velocity, which comes with
the free Storyline trial version. All right, so let's take the slides basically of this
velocity template. I'm going to select the first one. I'm going to hold down Shift and
kind of scroll, and select the last one. You can see they're all blue, which means we're
going to download those. And then we've got 43 slides that we're going to insert. I'll
select insert 43 slides. All right, so we now have 43 slides that we didn't have to
create. And if you're brand new, to e-learning, what I would suggest when you
download a template, go through each slide and just understand the format of it. So
it's an instruction slide, it's an objective slide, it's a main menu, it's a major point, et
cetera. Getting familiar with these very common slide formats will help you build
things quickly. All right, so we've downloaded our template, now let's make it our
own. And we're going to do that by applying the theme colors and fonts we created.
So we'll go up to design, under Colors, and then there's the prime energy color theme
that we created. We're going to right click it and select Apply to all slides, and then
you'll see some changes in this template. Now the same thing with fonts. We created
our theme fonts. Let's go apply 'em to each slide. So fonts drop down. We'll find our
fonts right there, we'll right click and we'll select apply to all slides. And there we
have it. If you're just getting started with storyline and need a template, don't reinvent
the wheel. Insert a slick looking template from the Content Library and tweak it to fit
your branding.
Previewing your work in Storyline

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- [Instructor] It's not uncommon for me to preview a slide 20 times before I'm done
with it. You'll be previewing your work a ton too. So, let's talk about efficient ways to
preview your work. Now, to begin, you can preview a slide, a scene, selected slides,
or the entire project, and you can do that from Slide View, where I am now, and also
in Story View. Now, let me give you three tips for previewing your work efficiently. Tip
one, settle on a process for previewing the individual slide because you'll be doing
that the most often. Now, if you just want to preview the animations, in the bottom
left of the timeline, just give that play button a click and you'll see your animations.
Now, if you want to preview the slide in its entirety, a few different ways you can do
that. Control + F12 is the shortcut. I'll often use, though, these icons in the top right.
And what's nice about these, they show you how your content or your slide is going
to appear on different devices. So, on the desktop, tablet landscape, portrait, phone
landscape, and then phone portrait. Tip two, you'll often be switching from Slide View
to Story View and back to get an aerial view of the project. So, settle on a way to
make that move. To get to Story View, you can go here in the bottom right, this little
icon here, not many people know about that, or often, and also in the top left, Story
View. What's nice is you can just click this content right here and get back to Slide
View. Nice, efficient move there. And tip three, give yourself the ability to set the
speed in which your slides play. You do this by selecting the playback speed
checkbox within player properties. This will allow you to preview the content at 1.25,
1.5, 1.75, or even two times normal playback speed. So, I'm in Slide View. I'll show
you how to set that. We'll go to Player, bottom left here, Player Controls. See this
playback speed, that's selected. We'll select OK. And then let's preview at, say,
double time. So, we'll select the playback speed, double time. Let's see what this
scene looks like at double time. And even the animations are double. Setting
playback speed allows you to be very efficient and comes in handy when you're
making your final, final reviews of the content. I'll talk in depth about player
properties later in the course. You're going to be previewing your work a ton.
Following the three tips I gave will allow you to preview as efficiently as possible.
Keyboard shortcuts and other efficiencies

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- [Instructor] Building just a simple elearning module consists of tens of thousands
of tasks: inserting an image, a text box, a shape, and on and on. If you want to be
known as someone who works quickly, and you do want that, you're going to have to
work efficiently. So let me show you some of the keyboard shortcuts and other
efficiencies that will really get you moving. Keyboard shortcuts are a huge time
saver. Here are a few I use all the time. To insert an image, ctrl + j. Select the image,
Open, and there it is. Position onscreen a little bit. To insert a text box, just click
onscreen where you want it and then ctrl + t. All the normal text shortcuts work as
well: ctrl + b to bold, ctrl + i to italicize, ctrl + z to undo, ctrl + y to redo. Now, let's talk
about working with objects. With working with objects, you can use ctrl + shift + drag
to duplicate an object. You'll be doing that one all the time. And you see that little
plus sign. So I've got ctrl + shift, pressing the keyboard, and then I'll just drag down,
let go of the mouse, duplicate it, drag down again, let go of the mouse, duplicate it.
ctrl + a selects everything onscreen. You'll be using that quite a bit. ctrl + g groups
everything. See that solid line around it? They're all grouped. And what's nice about
grouping objects, then you can play with the formatting. So I'll go up to Format and
then just basically fiddle around, see what I like. Now, if you want to preview just the
single slide, ctrl + F12 will do that. You may be using that quite a bit. And those are
the shortcuts I use all the time. Keyboard shortcuts and the other efficiencies I
demoed are small things that will save you big amounts of time. So try to get in the
habit of using them as much as you can.
Inserting, formatting, and animating text
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- [Instructor] Most of the content in your course will be in the form of text, which
means you're going to be working with text a lot. In this scenario slide, I want to add
two lines of text giving instructions. If you're familiar with PowerPoint, you're going to
feel right at home inserting and formatting text in Storyline. So to add text, you can
go up to Insert, Text Box, and then just click on screen where you want it and now
you have an active text box. Then I'll type in my text, I'm going to hit Enter to get that
second line. Now to position your text, click the boundary text box and really the
dotted line until you get the solid line and then see that cross hair, I'm just kind of
hovering over it. Once you get that cross hair, you can start dragging it wherever you
want. So that's one way you'll position. Another way you'll position is using the arrow
key, so I'm arrowing down left. Let's maybe go up a little bit and then to the left. I'm
just trying to align it with that S there. Now to format, we've got some formatting we
got to do here, right? So we will select it and then you can tell up here it has the, it
actually has the title font. We don't want that, right? We want the body copy. We want
the body font, which is Lato. So that's how you change the font right there. If you
want to change the color, come up to here, color selector. Another important reason
to set all your colors, right? You can just check one and move on with your day. So
that's how you change the color right there. To increase the font size, right up here,
the big A, go up, and down, small a. To italicize right here, and then also the keyboard
shortcut is, do you remember, Ctrl + I to italicize? And those are the main elements
you're going to format your text with. Inserting and formatting text in Storyline is
quite straightforward, especially if you are comfortable with PowerPoint. A few hours
working with it and I promise you'll feel right at home.
Applying animations and an overview of the timeline

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- [Instructor] One of our core concepts is creating visual interest. We can do that by
applying animations to elements on screen, whether it be text, shapes, images, or
even characters. On this slide, I want to animate these two lines of instructive text.
So I'll select it till I get that solid boundary line around it. Then I am going to go up to
the Animations tab. Want to point out two things. We have a section for our Entrance
Animations, right there, top left, right to the right, a section for our Exit Animations.
Now, I want to apply an entrance animation. So it's a little counterintuitive, you have
to go under None here and you find all your entrance animations. I will select Fly In.
Duration, a little bit less than default. Effect Options, it's actually going to be By
Paragraph, and that will allow this first line to come in and then this second line to
animate a little bit later. Now, as a general rule, you want to keep your animations
consistent in terms of type and duration. For instance, in this module, I'll pretty much
stick with fly in animations, mostly coming in from the left at .5 seconds. If you're not
sure what animation to use and you feel like you need one, just go with a fade. Like
the men's blue blazer, that one's always in style. Okay, now that we've applied
animations to objects on our slide, we need to concern ourselves with the timeline.
So to access that, at the very bottom here, bottom left, I'm going to click on Timeline
and it pops up. The timeline lists all the objects on the slide, when they are going to
appear, and their stacking order. And that's really important, I'm going to repeat it.
The timeline lists all the objects on the slide, when they're going to appear, and their
stacking order. And there's a lot to the timeline. Let me point out a few key features
and best practices. So you can drag items to the left or right on the timeline to
change when they appear. So I'll select this text box, you know, if I wanted it to
appear at two seconds, could do that. I like it where it is right now, so I'll drag it back.
You can drag an item up and down to change its stacking order. So I'll select this
rectangle, and you can see it's highlighted here on screen. I'll actually move it up in
the stacking order. And you can see it starts coming in front of stuff. Generally, you
want your backgrounds down or in the back, so I'll drag it down. You can rename
objects, and this is a good practice, especially if you have a lot of items on your
slides. For instance, let's rename this Text Box 1, we'll call it Instructions. And select
Enter. You can turn objects on and off, and this is a really good practice. If you think
maybe you'll use it later, you can just turn it off in the timeline. For instance, our
instructions text is highlighted, I'll just turn it off. And then maybe later a client says,
"Hey, I really liked added instructions text," well, you just turn it back on. You have the
ability to lock items into place on the timeline. Let's lock our rectangle and it goes
right here under the lock. Kind of intuitive, right? And then no matter how much you
try to move that rectangle, you're not going to be able to. So locking backgrounds is
especially important or any element that you're working next to. All right, let's go
back to animating those two specific lines of text. Remember how I selected fly in by
paragraph? Well, if we look at the timeline here, where the heck are those two lines of
text on the timeline? And the answer is they're hiding. And they're hiding behind this
little Play button. We'll select it. Oh, there they are. And so now we selected by
paragraph, now we can drag them to where we want. Let's say this first one about .5
seconds, and then this second line about .5 seconds later. Now, we could preview
this slide by going up there or Ctrl + F12, but a nice little thing about the timeline and
animations, you can preview your animations right from the timeline by selecting this
button on the bottom left. Ooh, I didn't want them coming up from the bottom, so I'm
actually going to change that. Let's go under our Fly In. Yep, we've got Fly In, that's
what we want, but we want to come in from the left, right? Let's go Effect Options.
Oh, yeah, this time from the left. Now let's preview the whole slide and see if we've
got what we want there. Perfect. Anytime you animate an object on the slide, you'll
be tweaking that element on the timeline. The more often you can employ the
animation best practices we discussed, the quicker you'll develop.
Inserting and editing Content Library assets

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in the video
- [Presenter] I'm going to date myself a bit, but there was a time when e-learning
developers had to create all of their own assets, which meant hours on stock photo
sites looking for the perfect image, and days creating characters for scenarios. Like
the need to have a landline at your house, those days are gone, for the Storyline
Content Library has become the one-stop shop that will allow you to spend more
time developing slides and less time hunting for assets. On this slide, I'm making the
point that the company I work for is the key to our client's puzzle, and I need some
visual to back up that metaphor, so let's check out the stock assets available to us in
the Content Library. So, I am in Slide View now to get to that. We'll select Insert, and
then here's all of the assets from the Content Library. Let's start with Characters.
Maybe one of those will be the key. So a lot of different character styles, gender,
clothing and age. Photographic, illustrated, modern, gender, male, female, clothing,
business casual, casual, et cetera. I kind of like Brandon here. He could be the key to
someone's puzzle. There are also a lot of different poses for your different
characters. These are especially helpful if you're doing scenario work. And man, this
is a gift from where we were 10, 15 years ago. I like Brandon. We'll insert him and
we'll put him off to the side. We'll keep him as a maybe. Let's see what else we could
insert. That is the key. So we'll put in key here. Enter. These are all pretty good. Is
there one you like particularly? We'll go with this. I like the green there. We have a lot
of green in our template, so I'll choose that. I'll hold down shift to maintain the aspect
ratio. That could work right there, especially with the greens. So we'll give that a
maybe too. Put that over there. Now how about, let's try an icon. A lot of options
here, right? Any one jumping out at you? I kind of like that one. Select it. The nice
thing about icons, and I'm going to hold down shift and make it a little bit bigger and
drag to maintain the aspect ratio. The nice thing about icons, super flexible. You can
just right click and change the color. That could work. I might make him a little
bigger. Maybe move him, too. Maybe put him in an angle or something. I'd fiddle with
him. Let's see what else we got. Go to Insert and let's try Video. We have key as our
search term there. Now, it's thinking we mean keyboard key. We don't mean that.
We'll keep on looking. Oh, this is kind of interesting. What's nice is you can preview it,
and let's just preview it. That's pretty cool. I like that. I'm going to insert that one.
Okay, so I'm going to hold down shift and drag to maintain that aspect ratio. I'm
going to drag him up a little bit. I think this guy's a winner. I'll nudge him up with the
keys a little bit. I like how it looks like kind of like a window. That's kind of nice.
Nudge him down a little bit. Let's preview. It's looking good. As you can see, there's a
lot of assets available to you in the Content Library, and this plethora will allow you
to spend more time developing and less time hunting for assets.
Inserting and formatting shapes

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in the video
- [Instructor] I need to visually represent the three-step renewable energy process. I
was hoping the process interaction that comes with their content library template
would work, but it's a little too boxy for my taste. No matter, I'll just build a simple
process graphic interaction using Storyline shapes. This is often what I'll do if I don't
have an existing image or illustration that meets my needs. So moving to a duplicate
of this slide basically. And I want to leverage the work of others, which is one of our
best practices. So I'm going to use this as basically a template, but the first thing I'm
going to do is remove the shapes. So I'll select all of them and you can select all of
'em by dragging all the way around. You see they're all selected. And then I'll select
Delete. And my process interaction is going to be based on chevron. So let's go get a
few of those. We'll go up to the Insert tab, Shape, Chevron's right about there. And
we'll click and drag where we want it. That's about right, I'll release. Let's type in our
text here. So I clicked in it and we'll format our text. All right, that's looking good so
far. Now, we will duplicate our chevron. We're going to duplicate it twice. So I'm
going to hold down Control + Shift and you should see that little plus sign.
Sometimes it kind of disappears on us, but yeah, there it is. Control + Shift. I'm going
to drag to the right, let go. There's chevron 2, drag to the right, and there's chevron 3,
looks good. Change the text in these two ones. Now we'll do a little formatting. Let's
select all of 'em. Go up to Format. And this is the one we want right there. Distribute
horizontally. You see that middle one moved. Now let's fiddle with the colors. We'll
select that one. We'll go up to Format. Hmm, tell me which one you like. Do you like
that? The darker blue, that's kind of sharp. Gray always works, right? Gray is super
neutral color, so it's always going to work with whatever you do. I kind of like the teal,
reminds me of the ocean. All right, so we like that teal or I like that teal. And then a
couple of options. We could manually select these and change the colors. But what I
like to do and something that allows us to work quickly, it's just using Format Painter
whenever we dialed in the format for something. So I've got this first chevron
selected, I'll go up to Format Painter, give it a double click there, see a little
paintbrush, and then we will boom on the Convert icon and then boom on the Use. So
just clicking to the shape you want to take that formatting. All right, I'll hit Escape to
get rid of that Format Painter. Let's do a little bit more formatting here. We're going
to group the whole thing. So dragging around, I'm going to do Control + G. And
what's nice about that, it just allows you to move it. You know, if you wanted to
position it down here, wherever you wanted to put it, really grouping it allows you to
move it without breaking it apart. Now, if you wanted to save the group as a picture,
which sometimes you want to, you can do that. Just right click on the whole thing.
Let's make sure we get the whole group there. There we go. The whole solid line
around the whole thing. We'll right click now and then we'll go to Export Shape as a
Picture. And then you could just save that wherever you wanted to. Not a bad idea,
especially if you have a complicated grouping, you've spent some time on it, not a
bad idea to save it as a picture. However, even if you save your shapes as a picture,
you still want to hang onto this slide with a shape somewhere. We often have to go
back and tweak the graphics we've made and it's quicker to be able to go back to the
original shapes, the original slide, you know, on which the graphic was built. What a
lot of people will do, and what I often do is you have a space, I'm going to go to
Storyview here in a little bit. Some people call it the slide graveyard. I call it slide
heaven. And then you place those slides you think you might need to come back to
and tweak. So that's what I usually do. So there you have it, a serviceable process
graphic built with Storyline shapes. Working with shapes in this manner allows you
to present content in a visually appealing way.
Inserting and formatting images

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in the video
- [Instructor] If you were a learner, what would hold your interest longer, the
information you see on this slide or this information? Images are an easy way to
create visual interest, which, if you've been following along, know is a best practice
of ours. Let me show a few moves I do all the time when it comes to inserting and
formatting images. I'm going to use this 50/50 layout to present some information
on the future of hydroelectric power. To create some visual interest, I want an image
on the right half of the slide. First thing I'm going to do is turn on the grid. So I'll right-
click, Grid and Guides, Display grid. And that, essentially, will give me that 50% mark.
Now, let's insert our image. Do you remember the keyboard shortcut, ctrl + j? But let's
go the long way around. We'll select Insert, Picture From File, select our image, Open.
And there it is. I'm going to drag it to the right. Next thing I'll do is rotate it. Flip
Horizontal. 'Cause I want the motion of it, the water of it, flowing to the left there.
Now I will crop it. The image is selected, Crop. Drag to that 50% mark, let go, click
outside the crop, and there you have it. Nice thing about the Crop feature, it's
nondestructive. So if you wanted a different crop down the road, you just select the
image, and then, you know, if you wanted something bigger, you just click outside
and you see it's a different crop. But I like the 50% one, so I'll go back and do that.
Crop and then we're going to that 50% place on the grid. Click outside and we have it.
At this point, we can turn our grid off. I think it's a little easier to see some things
with it off now. A minor thing I want to deal with, but it's going to come up, see this
little white space at the very bottom? We just need to make our image a little bit
bigger. I can do this a few different ways. We can fiddle with the width probably is
the easiest thing. And it's subtle, yep, that cleared it up. You could also drag it, but
that works too. All right, let's continue formatting. I'm going to select the image and
then right-click, Format Pictures, show you some of these options. You can dial in
the brightness if you want, the contrast, transparency. Actually, transparency's kind
of nice. It softens the image. Let's do it up to 10. And you can tell. It's subtle, but it
gives it a little bit of softness. I like that. We'll select Close. One last minor tweak I
want to do, I want to create a border, a subtle border around the edge of the image.
So the image is selected, we'll go to Format. Let's go to Picture Border. And I always
go really subtle. It's usually a, you know, a gray will work with not a very big weight,
like a one weight. And you can kind of see. I mean, it's subtle, but there's a thin line
between the image and the white. I think it gives it a little bit of polish. The nice thing
about formatting images in Storyline is you can use Format Painter. So if you spent
some time, you know, kind of dialing in the formatting of your image and you want to
apply it to all your other images, which you usually want to do, just select your image,
double-click on Format Painter. You'll see the paintbrush. And then, on any other
image in your course, you can just paste the formatting. Now, if you feel an image
you've tweaked is not working, you can right-click and replace that image. First, let
me get rid of that little Format Painter thing. I usually do escape, yeah, there we go.
So let's say you have this image, you're like, "Ah, it's not really the perfect one." So
just right-click, Replace Picture, From File. And what's nice, it is it will take all the
formatting you did and apply it to this new one. Now we'll need to change it a little
bit, but I'll do ctrl + z, 'cause I like my original one. Nice little tweak, though, if you
want to change out the image quickly. Using images effectively is an easy way to
create visual interest. Now that you know the common formatting and cropping tips,
you're well on your way to creating more engaging courses.
Working with Storyline's characters

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in the video
- [Instructor] Like a lot of people who create e-learning, I'm an introvert who'd rather
listen than talk. However, like most learners we're trying to reach, I'm still inherently
interested in other people, what they say, how they act, how they respond to
situations, like Harriet here. And Storyline has a feature that allows us to exploit the
interests people have in other people, and that's character packs. I'm going to build
this particular slide around a conversation between two people, and the person on
the left here that we're going to put in will be posing a question to the person on the
right. And it's really a scenario, and then the learner would choose the various
options. So let's go get some people. We'll head on up to the Insert tab. That makes
sense, right? Under the Content library section, we'll select Characters. Of course, a
ton of options here. I'll just point out a few. Photographic, Illustrated, Male, Female,
Business Casual, Casual, different Industries, Medical, different Ages. So just about
anything you'd need, you're going to find here with the characters. Let's go back up.
I'm going to do Photographic. I kind of like Brandon. I'm going to point out a few of
the poses here. We'll select Pose, and then you see these Emotions and Styles. Let's
go with a Neutral emotion. He's just basically going to be asking a question. And he's
going to be Talking. And he's going to be looking to his left, so now we need to go
hunt for a pretty good one. How about that one? Yeah, that could work. Maybe that's
even better. Looks like he's asking a question there. We'll select Insert. Okay, we've
got our Mr. Brandon here. Now we'll go back up and we'll find a female. We'll select
Insert, Characters. Yeah, Laura looks nice. She'll work. Let's go to Pose. And the
emotion is going to be just kind of neutral. And then she's going to be Listening. We
could also do Reacting. So if we don't find something for Listening, we'll go to
Reacting. And she's kind of looking to her right. Let's see what that one, that could
work. That looks nice. You know, really neutral. And it's never like you're going to get
the perfect pose. You're going to get darn close, but you know, rarely is it perfect. But
that is about as close as I'm going to get. And I like that one. All right, so now we
crop. I'll select Mr. Brandon here. Crop. Probably crop him right below the belt. Select
Outside. And then I'm going to use the arrow keys and move him down. And what's a
best practice is to align him, or whoever your character is, with an object so they
don't appear sawed off. And so, obviously, we need to make him a little bigger. He's
pretty small, right? So we're going to hold down Shift, and we're going to make him
bigger. Ah, right about there. And we're holding down Shift to maintain that aspect
ratio. All right, move him over a little bit using the arrow keys. And now, Laura. It's
Laura's turn. We'll select her. Select Format. Let's do Crop, maybe right below the
hands there. We'll see how that looks. We can always change it. And there's a lot of
tweaking with this. You know, you may spend a few minutes just getting in one
character. Let's use the arrow keys to move her down. And we'll hold down Shift,
we'll make her a little bit bigger. Something like that. Just move her over. So a little
closer. And again, I cropped her and moved her against a solid background so she
doesn't appear sawed off. I might make her a little bit smaller. All right, that's looking
pretty good. I'm just going to move Brandon over a little bit. All right, I like that. One
situation you should be aware of. If you use characters in your course, they become
defacto guides. If you're using mostly female characters and you have a narrator
who is also a type of guide, you probably want to have a female narrator. Otherwise,
you might get comments from reviewers that your characters and your narrator don't
jive. One last thing before we go. If you want to learn how specific storyline
characters are often used, you might want to check out my LinkedIn presentation,
The Day the Characters Quit. In a humorous way, it highlights the roles that the most
popular storyline characters are often cast in.
Inserting and syncing audio

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in the video
- [Instructor] Originally, this takeaway slide was a static slide. A key stakeholder,
however, wants the three points on this slide to be voiced over, which means we'll
have to create, insert, and sync an audio file to the animated text. And the animated
text will be these three lines of texts. Okay, to create an audio file from the home tab,
we're going to select Insert, we'll go over to audio here. And a number of options, you
can insert audio from file if you've recorded it, you can use a media library, you can
record right into storyline if you wanted to. and you can do text to speech. That's
what I'm going to select. And I found just over the last year or two, the generative AI
voices have gotten really good. So that's what I'm going to choose here. Want to
point out a few options with our text-to-speech here. From the dropdown, you have
languages, and you also have the dialect. So English with an Australian accent, that'd
be kind of cool. Indian, UK. US is what I'm going to choose. And then a whole bunch
of different voices you could choose. I've had really good luck with Matthew, so I'll
choose him, and you can preview the voice. We'll go ahead and do that. - [Matthew]
Hi, my name is Matthew. I will read any text you type here. - [Instructor] Okay, and
that sounded a little stilted, right? But once you give it an actual script to read, it
sounds better as you'll hear here in a second. And you can also generate closed
captions if you want. So at this point, I am going to just paste the voiceover script in,
ctrl + V. That's what Matthew is going to read. And then we will select insert. And we
have our audio file right down here. How easy was that? If you want to edit the audio,
easiest way to get started with that is just double click on the waveform in the
timeline. So here's the waveform or the audio file. Let's make some minor tweaks.
We'll take out this a little pause. This is really between 0.1 and 0.2. We'll delete that
one. Same here. You're just speeding up the pace when you do this. Okay, if you want
to alter the volume, what I often do is click in here, ctrl + A, which will select
everything. And then you can, you know, bump the volume by 10, 20%, whatever you
want to. And I will say, I wouldn't recommend you do a lot of heavy audio edits within
storyline. I would use a dedicated audio editor such as Audacity or Adobe Edition.
But once you are cool with your edits here, just select Save and Close, and you've
edited your audio. Next thing I want to do is to insert the voiceover script in the notes
panel. The notes panel is really a tab on the player that allows the end users to see
the voiceover script. And you can see it down here by the timeline here, notes. I'm
going to select it. And again, I have the script in my clipboard, so ctrl + V to paste it
in, move that up a little bit bigger, and you often have to do a little bit of formatting.
Alright, that's looking good. I want to make sure that notes panel is on the player. So
on the far right here, edit properties, I call it the gear icon, we'll select that. Let's just
make sure the notes panel is checked. No, it isn't. So let's go ahead and check that
bad boy right there. We also want to check the seek bar. And whenever I have an
audio or a video clip, I like to have a seek bar, that way the user can scrub. So let's
select Okay. Let's preview to make sure what we've got so far. - [Matthew] Prime
Energy is the leading energy consulting firm in the US and has been active since
2000. - [Instructor] Yeah, Matthew sounds better once you give him a script to read.
So notes panel, let's see if our voiceover script is in there. Yes it is, nice work. And
then we have the seek bar so the user can scrub. Okay, we're getting close to being
done. We've created, inserted, and edited our audio. Now, let's get to syncing our
audio to the animated text. So these are the three groups that are going to come in.
So what I'll do, I'll select all of them, then I'll go up to animations. And do you
remember our default animations we've been doing? It's a fly in, right? At 0.5 and it's
coming in from the left. Now we're going to go back to the timeline and we're going
to mark on the timeline now where we want those three lines of animated text to fly
in. I'll do this by creating cue points on the timeline. I'll play the audio from the
timeline and then tap C on my keyboard where I want the cue point to appear. -
[Matthew] Prime Energy is the leading energy consulting firm in the US and has been
active since 2000. We have experts who specialize in oil, natural gas, coal, electricity,
and renewables. We offer a free 60-minute consultation to see how we might help
you address your challenges. - [Instructor] So we have our three cue points, one, two,
three. Let me make this a little bit bigger so you can see all of it. And now what we
can do is just grab group one, right, and just move it to the first one, group two is
going to two, group three is going to three. That's probably the quickest way to do it.
And really probably you could have eyeballed this too, if you've done some audio
editing. You know, this is the first line, this is the second line, this is the third line. But
we use the cue points, I wanted to show you that. Another option is to right click on
the thing you want to align and then select align to cue point. Now in this option, it's
pretty simple, right? So probably dragging is the easier way. But if you had a longer
audio clip, say 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and you had, you know, 12 animations, you
might right click and set a line to cue point. That might be a better option for you.
Okay, let's preview. - [Matthew] Prime Energy is the leading energy consulting firm in
the US and has been active since 2000. We have experts who specialize in oil,
natural gas, coal, electricity, and renewables. We offer a free 60-minute consultation
to see how we might help you address your challenges. - [Instructor] Nice, nice work
everyone. And that's how to create, insert, and sync an audio clip in storyline.
Inserting and editing video clips

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- [Instructor] Whether it's a screen recording, interview, or in-the-field shot, I work with
video on almost every project. In this scene, I'll insert a video clip I shot in the field.
It'll serve as a transition slide in the module. I noticed the template I downloaded
from Content Library doesn't have a unique layout for video. An easy way around that
is to insert a new slide with a blank layout and then just go full screen with the video.
So that's what I'll do. I'm in STORY VIEW here. I'll go up to New Slide, Basic Layouts,
and then just choose Blank. So here's our untitled slide. We'll double click, brings us
to slide view. Now let's insert our video. Which tab do you think we'll go to? INSERT,
right? Yeah, INSERT. That makes sense. Insert Video. Video from File. There's the
transition one. We'll select Open. And it brings it in, which it's kind of nice, it brings it
in really full screen so we don't have to monkey with the layout there. I'm going to
point your attention to the top here. We're going to move left to right, and so Preview
is the first thing we want to do. We'll select it. All right, that's a long vertical pan,
probably too long, so we'll make some tweaks to it. So that's the preview function.
Video Volume. You can boost the volume if you want. We're actually going to mute it
since it's just a transition slide. You can edit the video. We'll do that in just a sec. You
can show the video in slide or also in a new browser window. You can play the video
automatically, which is what I'm going to choose. Or you could do when it's clicked,
that's popular. Or you could have a trigger as to what gets the video to fire. Video
Control, Show none. And then you can add captions and do other things as well. Let's
go ahead and edit our video. Before we get started, I'd just like to mention that it's
not like you're going to do heavy edits in the Storyline video editor, you're going to do
light edits. If you have heavy edits, you want to use a dedicated tool such as Adobe
Premier or Camtasia to do that type of work. But for light edits, Storyline editor is
perfect. Now I'm going to talk about the options from right to left. If you get in here
and you decide this isn't even the video I want, you can change it out with that
Change Video selection there. If you want to reset it, if you've made a whole bunch of
tweaks and you're like, "Ah, geez, none of these are working," you could reset it to its
initial state. You can insert a logo. People generally don't do that anymore, but you
certainly could. You can fiddle with the Brightness, Contrast, the Volume we talked
about, you know, if you want to boost it, but we've muted it, so we're good there. You
could crop the video, and then you could also trim it. That's what we're going to do.
And when you select Trim, Storyline automatically selects a few seconds from the
beginning and ending that it thinks you want to cut. And you can see those
selections by the blue bands here in the left and then the right. And so what we want
to do is drag these blue bands to where we want the video to start and stop. So let's
do that. So that's where I want it to start, right about three seconds or so. And then
let's drag these blue bands at the right here to where we want it to stop. Probably
right about there. That looks good. Let's preview in the editor. That looks good. I'm
happy with my edits, so I'll select Save & Close. And now I always preview for real.
Really nice, a perfect transition video. If you're anything like me, you'll be working
with video a good deal. And Storyline makes it easy to insert and make light edits to
your video.
Inserting closed captions for videos

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in the video
- [Instructor] Let me show you how to upload your sustainability analysis on your
projects. First, go to the Drive folder shared with you, and create a new folder with
the official name and number of your project. Creating closed captions or subtitles
on your videos is a good thing. For one, it makes your videos more accessible to
people viewing them in loud environments, say on public transit, who can't access
their headphones. It also makes them more accessible to those who aren't native
speakers of the language. And finally, it makes them more accessible to the millions
of people with disabilities. And in addition to making them more accessible, adding
captions also makes your videos more searchable, another good thing. In this video,
I'll show you how to create closed captions. The particular video we'll be doing it for
is a screen recording showing the three steps of uploading a sustainability analysis
to a Drive folder. So the first thing we'll do is insert our video file on this slide. So we'll
go up to Insert, Video, Video from File, select the video, Open. All right, to get started
adding our captions, under Options here you see Add Captions, so I'll give that a
click. We are going to create captions, but you certainly could import captions if you
are using another tool, such as otter.ai or rev.com. And if you import captions, you'll
likely be importing a .srt file. Other options here at the top, you can export captions if
you'd like to, you want to save them. And then if you've gone through this whole
process and you just don't like what you've done, you can delete all of them. Before
we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about the structure. So essentially we
have four captions we're going to insert. And if you look at the audio file here and the
waveform here, you can kind of see what they are. So one is just some introductory,
"Here's what we're going to do." And then this one from 5 seconds to 10 seconds is
step two. We scroll down here, this is step three, the next step. And then that's it,
little throwaway line. When you're creating captions, especially for this type of video,
it's going to be really helpful if you have the script of your video, that way you can
just copy and paste into the caption. For example, here's this short script that I'm
going to be working with. So, let's get started. I'm going to paste the script into the
various captions. Let me show you how to upload your sustainability analysis. Paste
that one in. We're going to move the playhead over this caption that I don't want, and
then we're going to select Delete Caption. And then we're just going to stretch this
guy over. All right, so there's one down. Now for the first step in the process, we'll put
it right here. First, go to the Drive folder shared with you, we'll paste it in, Ctrl + V. And
then I'll delete the ones that I don't want. I want that one, Delete. Don't want that one
either 'cause I'm going to just stretch this guy over. All right, let's work down the line
here. Next, upload the official analysis template. Delete the one we don't want.
Stretch it over. Finally, share the folder with the designated project manager. Now,
for this little that's it line, we don't have one so let's go mark a spot on the playhead
there gives us this Insert Caption option and we'll just type in, "That's it." That's it. All
right, let's move this over. Yeah, right about there. Let's just do a quick review, make
sure everything's aligned. All right, that's looking good. I am going to Save & Close.
So we're going to get ready to preview this, and we just need to make sure we have
that closed caption option on the player. So let's go make sure we've got that. Let's
go to the Home tab, we'll go to Player. And then under Player Controls, yes, we do
have it right there. So the only way you're going to see captions is if you have that
selected. So that looks good, we'll select OK. And now we'll preview it. Let me show
you how to upload your sustainability analysis on your projects. Now, where are our
captions? What do you think we need to do? That's right, we need to select the Show
Captions button. It's underlined in green there. And now we can replay or preview for
real. Here we go, let me show you how to upload your sustainability analysis on your
projects. First, go to the Drive folder shared with you and create a new folder with the
official name and number of your project. Next, upload the official analysis template
into the folder you created. And that is how to create closed captions to your videos.
Doing so makes your videos more accessible as well as searchable.
Creating layers for a tabs interaction

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in the video
- [Instructor] In this chapter, we'll build a tab interaction. Tab interactions are great
because they allow you to break information into small chunks. Once you get
comfortable building tab-like interactions, which rely on layers and triggers, the rest
of storyline will fall into place. I'm basing this interaction on a renewable energy
process graphic that I built with storyline's shapes. And for this interaction and in
this movie, we'll build three layers. Layers are pieces of additional content that
appear in response to the learner doing something. For instance, the learner will click
the different chevrons here and be presented with additional information. So let's get
started creating and populating our layers. If you look at the slide layer panel here
over on the right, you'll see our main slide is called the base layer. The layers we
create will go right above that. So let's get started. We'll select the New Layer button.
This will be the Generate layer. Select Enter. Now let's add a shape to it. Insert,
Shape. I like this rectangle, works pretty well. Click and drag. And as a general rule,
you want to go bigger with your shapes that are going to contain text because it
always happens that you'll get to a piece of content that has a lot more text than your
original piece of content did. So I would suggest going a little bit bigger than smaller
than you think you need. All right, let's format this a little bit. The shape is selected. I
kind of like this blue-gray. I think that looks kind of nice. Let's add an icon. So Insert,
Icon. And we're looking for things that relate to generate. See any you like? Let's load
more results. That's not bad that one. That's kind of nice. Let's grab that one. And we
get the crosshairs there, we'll drag him over. Let's right click. I'd rather see him in
white, and close. It looks good. Now let's bring in our text. We could do Control + T,
right? Or we can go the long way around. Insert, Text Box, click where we want it.
And I have my text in my clipboard. So Control + V. And we need to do a little
formatting here. And sometimes when this happens, what we can do is go minimize.
So I'm at 100%. Go way down to whatever it is, 30, whatever it takes so you can see
the slide again. But this does happen from time to time. So now I'll go back up to
100, and we'll arrow this up, move it over. I'm just using the arrow keys. Let's see
what this looks like in white. Yeah, that looks pretty good. You might like the blue a
little bit better, but it's legible. I think it jives with the icon better too. I'll open up the
Layers panel again that closed. Okay, so we have one layer that's looking good. Now
we're going to duplicate it twice instead of creating two more other layers. Because
when you're using that technique, you're working from a template rather than
creating a bespoke layer and then another bespoke layer. So we have this layer, let's
duplicate it twice. Once, twice. And then this one here will be the Convert layer. And
this one here will be the Use layer. Now let's go make tweaks to the second and third
layer. Let's bring in another icon. So this is Convert. Let's see what we can come up
with. We'll go up to Insert, Icons. We'll put in our convert concept. Let's go with that
one. Okay, so we have him, we're waiting for the crosshairs, and then we'll bring him
over. And I just want to do some sizing. So that's about the same size. It's a little
smaller. So I'm going to hold down Shift, make him just a little bit bigger. Okay, I'm
going to open the timeline. That will allow me to delete the one right below it. So
Generate, we can now get rid of. So I selected on the timeline, select Delete, and then
I got to move him over a little bit. And sometimes it's a little tricky to grab the icons.
Maybe there. Okay, that looks good. We're going to right click and make him white.
We need to change out this text because this is the convert layer. Control + V. All
right, let's go to the Use layer. Again, let's bring in a different icon. That one's pretty
nice. I'll select him, again, just wanting to match sizing. So I'll get the crosshair, which
means I can drag him over. I think that works, we'll bring up the timeline so we can
delete the original Generate icon. Select Delete, right click, Format, choose a color,
and then we'll switch out the text. Cool. We've created and populated our layers for
our tab interaction. There's the base layer, Generate, Convert, and Use. Two things
we do next, format the layers, and create the triggers that allow the interactivity to
happen.
Formatting layers for a tabs interaction

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- [Instructor] All right, we are building a tab-like interaction on the renewable energy
process. We've created and populated our layers that you see here on the right in the
layers panel. However, we need a little flare or in terms of the best practices this
course is built on, we need to create some visual interest. We'll do that by adding
states to each of our three chevrons and animations to our three layers. Let's get
started by adding a selected state to each of our three chevrons. An object state in
Storyline is how it appears after a user has performed an action on it. For instance,
they've hovered over it, selected it, and so on. So let's select our Generate icon. And
then in the timeline, let's select States. We'll select Edit States, then New State, and
then there's a dropdown here. Let's see what's in the dropdown. Do we have it
selected? Yeah, we do. So we'll select Selected. Select Add. And now we have two
states that look identical, which isn't really helpful, right? But you see Selected is
selected. So now let's do a little bit of formatting. We have the Generate icon
selected. Let's go up to Format. Instead of going here, I have more options if I go to
Shape Fill, and that's what I want to do. I like that one. That's a nice selected state.
So the normal state is the blue. Once they click on it, they get the tannish one. I like
that. I'll select Done. Go back to the timeline. Now we want to work efficiently, right?
That's one of our best practices. And instead of going through that manual process
for each of the other icons, we're going to select the Generate icon, which is
selected. We'll go to Home. Format Painter, we'll give it a double click. We should see
the paint brush. And then we'll be able to paste that new state into these Convert
icon and then the Use. And so I'll hit Escape to get rid of that brush. Now let's go see.
We'll go to the Convert. We'll go to the States. Yeah, that one's there too. And let's
just double check. We'll go to Use, does that have the new state? Yeah, that does too.
So using Format Painter, a way to work efficiently. Now let's animate the three layers
we created, again, to create some visual interest. So I will go over here to the Layers
panel. I'm going to select the generate layer, and let's just animate this shape in.
We'll select it. Let's go to animations. None, again, a little counterintuitive, but you'll
get used to it. Fly in. Do you remember we were, what's our duration? It was 0.5,
right? Effect Options from the left. That's how it'll look. And if you want to preview it,
it's kind of nice in the timeline. Just give that button down there a click. Yeah, it's just
a quick little animation. Again, just a little bit of visual interest. And to work
efficiently, we're going to use the animation painter to the background shapes on the
other layers. We won't go through it manually, we're just going to work efficiently and
use the Animation Painter. So this layer is selected with its animation. You can see
that little star. We'll go to Animation Painter. Double click. Should see a paintbrush.
Yup. Go to the convert layer, paste it there. See the star? It's pasted. Go to Use. Paste
it there. You see the star, you know it's coming over. And we'll select Escape to get
rid of the paintbrush. All right, let's preview, see what we got. All right, we've got that
selected state, that one, that one. Nice. We formatted our layers for our tab
interaction. The thing to do now would be to create the triggers that will get the
layers we built to appear.
Setting up triggers for a tabs interaction

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- [Instructor] All right, this is pretty exciting. we've built, populated, and animated the
three layers of our tab-like interaction. And we've applied a selected state to our
Chevrons. The final step is to create what's called a trigger to each Chevron that will
cause the appropriate layer to fire when the user clicks a Chevron. So, let's create our
first trigger, I'm going to turn your attention to the top right of the screen, which is our
Triggers panel. You'll notice that some player triggers are already added, and we will
add a slide trigger. So, here is the insert trigger icon, we'll select it. Now, the trigger
asks you what action do you want to have happen, and when do you want to have it
happen? So, we want to show a layer, right? That's true. And which layer do we want
to show? Well, we'll work left to right. And so, we'll show the Generate layer first. So,
let's select. Yeah, we want to show the Generate layer. And when the user clicks
Chevron 3, no, I'm pretty sure Chevron 1 is our generate, so we will select Chevron 1,
and then we're good! So again, the action. They're going to show a layer, which layer?
Generate, when? When the user clicks Chevron 1, which is our Generate Chevron.
Looks good, select OK. Now, let's add another trigger for the convert layer. So again,
Create new trigger. What do we want to have happen? Yes, we want to show a layer.
Now, which layer this time? Convert, right? Select Convert. When the user clicks,
when the user clicks what? Well, Chevron 2, right? All right, Show layer, Convert layer,
when the user clicks Chevron 2, looks good. And then the last one, you can probably
do this one. So, we're going to create a new trigger. What do we want to have
happen? Show a layer. Now, which layer? Use, right? Use when the user clicks
Chevron 3, is that the used Chevron? Yep, that's it. Okay! So, we have our object
triggers. Now, just as you can with states and animations, you can copy a trigger
from one object and apply it to another. This move will be helpful if you have a lot of
triggers in there, fairly complex. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to delete Chevron
3 trigger, Chevron 2 trigger, and this is how you delete it right up here. And then, let's
copy this one because this is basically the core of the trigger that we want, right,
from Chevron 1. So, what you can do is go up here, select Copy the selected trigger,
and then pick your object, and then paste it. So, I'll paste it to the third Chevron as
well. And then, you need to go back and make some tweaks. This trigger we copied
is all the information for the generate layer. But let's go tweak Chevron 2 and
Chevron 3 triggers, so let's look at Chevron 2 first. So, when the user clicks Chevron
2, okay, that's convert. They're going to show layer generate. Ah, it's not quite right,
so we'll just tweak it. We want to show layer convert, right? So, you just make that
small tweak instead of creating a whole thing. So, let's go to Chevron 3 and make our
little tweak. Chevron 3, when the user clicks Chevron 3, what happens? Layer
generate, that's not quite right, right? We want the Use layer. So, we'll just select Use.
And copying and pasting triggers in that way is really working efficiently. All right,
let's preview this bad boy. Generate, cool, we got the animation, we got the selected
state, Convert. Nice, Use, perfect. The triggers we built cause the layers to fire
perfectly. Because it involves creating layers and applying triggers to objects,
building tab interactions is a great way to get your mind around the architecture of
storyline. I recommend trying your hand at such interactions as soon as you're able.
Creating and linking scenes

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- [Instructor] Storyline groups individual slides into scenes. And even though most of
your courses will be linear, you'll want to create new scenes now and again so you
can separate the basic building blocks of your course. I want to create a new scene
that I can build quiz questions in. Two ways you can create a new scene. Probably
the easiest is to right-click on the scene and select new scene. You can also go up to
the ribbon though, as well. All right, let's give this new scene a name. I'll double-click
in here, and I tend to capitalize my scenes. Select Enter, and then I'm going to give
this 2.1 slide different name. Double-click and select Enter. Now we have two
scenes, but they're not linked, meaning the user's going to get the slide 1.4 here and
jump into the gray abyss. They're not going to be able to go anywhere. You can tell
these scenes are not linked to each other because they are side-by-side. Now, to link
them, you're either going to use a trigger or the link icon. Remember, a trigger
answers two questions. What action do you want to have happen and when? Let's
link these scenes using a player trigger. Now I'm going to turn your attention to the
right here under triggers, player triggers. There's already a player trigger associated
with slide 1.4, which is selected. So essentially it has to do with next button, swipe
next. When the user clicks next or swipes next on this slide 1.4, they're going to jump
to the next slide. Well, we don't know what the next slide is, so we just need to tweak
it, right? The next slide we want is 2.1. So we'll go under this hyperlinked. Next slide,
select 2.1, and then you can see they're now linked because scene two jumped
below scene one. Another option to link scenes is the link icon, which is really a
different form of a trigger. So let's do that. I'm going to do Control + Z to get rid of
the tweak to that player trigger we just made. Now the link icon is simple. It's right
here. Click it. What do you want to do? You want to link to a new scene? Okay, which
one? It's scene two, right? Boom. And then scene two just comes right below it. So
let's sum up. Storyline groups individual slides into scenes. To link those scenes
together, you'll either use a trigger or the link icon, as I've just demonstrated.
Creating a labelled graphic interaction

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- As an e-learning developer, I always assume my learner is just one slide away from
being bored, which of course is the kiss of death. To keep the learner engaged, I
always try to mix up the way I present material, which if you've been following along
know is a best practice of ours. Labeled graphic interactions do this well as they get
learners pulling information rather than me as a developer always pushing it at them.
I use labeled graphics quite a bit in software training, you know, pointing out the
different fields, and also for equipment training, as you see here. I built this particular
interaction by inserting markers over an image. Let me show you how I did it. Okay,
so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to insert our image here and then
insert the markers around it. Keyboard shortcut for inserting image is Control + J, but
we'll go the long way around. That's fine. There it is. Select Open. All right, we'll drag
it probably over there. We'll line it up here with the bottom right so it doesn't seem
sawed off. All right, I like the way that looks. I'm going to lock the image on the
timeline. Recommend you do this 'cause you're going to be fiddling around the image
and you probably will move it if you don't lock it. So it's locked down. Then we can't,
no matter what we do, we can't move it. All right, let's insert our marker. Insert. All
the way onto the right here. Interactive objects. We have markers. And more markers
than you probably know what to do with, but that's, you know, that's not a bad
problem to have. Let's go with, I kind of like that one, italicized i, and we just click
where we want the first one. And then I need, what do I need? One, two, three, four of
these. I need four of these. So I'm going to hold Control + Shift + down, see that little
plus sign and just drag, release. There's two, release, there's three, release, there's
four. Now let's place them where we want them. This one's going to be the hub
eventually, so right there. And this one. Okay, let's put in our text for our markers.
Just click on it and you add your title and you can add the text. I have it in my
clipboard for this one. And I'll paste in my text, Control + V, and minimize the real
estate. We don't need that much real estate for that one, right? So we'll just, you kind
of fiddle with it, see what works. I don't really need that scroll bar. So maybe
something like that. And I'm going to move this up using the arrow keys. Okay, let's
see what we've got so far. Looking good so far. Let's preview. I like that one. That
works. That works. That should be the hub, tower. Oh, I'm not crazy. See the bottom
here? This often happens. It's opening up below the player. So let's go fix that. And
then you just drag it up. I'll format this a bit. All right, cool. So far so good. Let's talk
about some formatting options. There are a lot of formatting options. Go up to
Format here. Going to kind of work from left to right here. So you can insert audio,
you know, in the marker if you want to. All sorts of media, you know, a picture from
file. You could do a video from file if you wanted to. It might be kind of nice,
especially maybe in an equipment training. You can turn off the pulse that bugs
some people. I think it gives it a little bit of visual interest, so I kind of like it. But you
could turn that off if you wanted to. All sorts of marker styles. I kind of like the blue
there. You know, we might tweak it. The green works well. Maybe we'll grab those.
So that's the green. Let's try to select all of these, right? So hold down Shift. Then
we'll go back up to Format. Let's see if we can grab that green. Yeah, that's a little bit
nicer. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah, the blue text, too. Nice, kind of nice contrast
there, I think. And then marker fill. You know, marker border. Could change out the
icon color. I mean, you could really go crazy if you wanted to. I kind of like the default
settings there. And I think in Storyline as a general rule that it, you know, they do a
really good job, so the default settings work well. So I'll keep those default. All right, I
like the way that's looking. Let's preview it. Nice. And working well. Labeled graphics
are a great way to mix up the way you present material. Consider using them in your
next software or equipment training.
Inserting a scrolling panel

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- [Presenter] "There's no end to how much information you can place in an articulate
scrolling panel," says that to me. "It's like infinite space. Which makes them great for
summaries and read-and-acknowledge activities often found in compliance training."
So let me show you how to build one. This slide is a section summary. I wanted to
keep it short, but the client wanted to add a few more takeaways, I'm sure you can
relate. To accommodate that request I call upon the power of the scrolling panel. So
the first thing I'm going to do is select this text and move it off screen. And then let's
insert our scrolling panel, let's go up to insert, over here, interactive objects of which
the scrolling panel is one. I'll select it, and then essentially click and drag where you
want the scrolling panel to go. And I've had luck making the scrolling panel a little bit
skinnier than the width of the text you want to put into it. Okay, we've got our
scrolling panel, you can see a little bit of the timeline here that it's called scroll one.
Now let's place our text inside of it. And just a heads up, this is really trial and error, it
may take you three, four, five times to get your information in it, but let's give it a
whirl. I've had better luck going up. We'll drop it. Yeah, we were lucky the first time,
we got it in. And you know you have your scrolling panel properly working when it
appears right here, and you can scroll up and down your text, so we know this text is
in the scrolling panel. If we wanted to double check, we certainly could go to the
timeline, open this button right here and you see the text is in it. I might move this up
a little bit, so I'm going to select it, arrow up, just so we have that nice alignment with
the one and then that green rectangle right there. A cool thing about scrolling panels
is you can insert all sorts of fun stuff like an Easter egg encouraging your learner on,
and this is appropriate because you're often going to use this when you have a big
hunk in text box. So let's bring in an image, a little Easter egg. You remember the
keyboard shortcut for image, control + j? A little nice effort Easter egg. And let's bring
her in as well. And we know she's in if she scrolls, she doesn't scroll so she's not in.
So let's try it again. Yep, now she scrolls. I use the arrow key to put her in place. Let's
make sure everything scrolls that we want. Let's preview. Okay, we've got our text,
we've got our scroll bar. Scroll down, working as expected. Scrolling panels are a
great way to add breathing room to your content. Consider using them in summary
type slides and read-and-acknowledge activities.
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In this video
Creating a 360-degree image interaction

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- I'm especially excited to show you this next storyline interaction. It's called 360-
degree image, and it's really helpful if you want to give your learner the opportunity to
explore a space. I use this immersive interaction all the time, especially in relation to
guided tours such as this one. So let's go ahead and build this fun interaction. On
this blank slide, we will build a guided tour interaction in which a learner will drag
through a 360-degree image of an award-winning office our firm consulted on. First
thing we'll do is insert our 360-degree image. Insert, and it's 360-degree image right
there. Don't try to insert a picture. That won't work. Select it, open, and there it is. And
just a note, you can take 360-degree images using the pano function on your phones.
Now I want to insert a shape that will just give our learner some instructions as to
what this interaction is all about. So I'll go to insert, shape, just a rectangle will do.
Click and drag. I have the text in my clipboard, control V, and we'll format this a bit.
Actually, we'll have this background, this green background match the couch. So
right click, format shape. Grab the eyedropper. It's looking better. Transparency. We
definitely want it transparent, maybe 30%. That usually works for this type. Select
enter. And we have that green background that's probably going to bug me on this
shape, so let's fix that. Format shape, line color, no line. Nice. Now the learner kind of
knows what this interaction is all about. There's a lot you can add to a 360-degree
image, a layer, a photo, a video, but I'll keep things simple and insert three markers.
To get started with that, select edit 360-degree image. And to add our markers, go up
to marker, give it a click, and then click on screen where you want the first one. First
one will go right there. Let's drag and place our second one. Let's have it be right
there. We'll select marker right there. We'll put the second one and the third one up to
marker. Click where we want it. Right there. Great. I want to point out some
formatting options with your markers. If we go up here, I'm kind of working left to
right. We can change the icon within the marker. I'm fine with the plus sign, but you
may want something different. Change the accent color. Label. There's a lot you can
do with a label, and basically that's the black background with the text. Other options,
I'm going to select label options here. All sorts of things you can insert in your
marker label. Picture from content library. I mean, it's free. Why not, right, if you want
to do that. Picture from file, media library, screenshot, audio, you know, audio from
file. You could record right into it. You could do text to speech. That'd be kind of cool.
Let's explore what's under interaction. One big thing I want to highlight here, you can
change the initial view of your interaction. So here's the initial view. When they come
into my interaction, they're going to see this structure with plants. Now, if you wanted
a different initial view, you could do that. You could just drag it there and then select
save and close. I'm happy with where it was, so we'll just get out of here, but
definitely wanted to show you that. Alright, some other options that are important
and really have to do with navigation, if we look here under markers and hotspot, you
have two options, free navigation, which I've chosen and I really do like to give the
learner as much freedom as I can, but if you wanted to guide them, you could select
guided tour, and that's just going to point them to the markers that you've put in the
interaction. I like the free navigation because we also have a progress indicator. So
the learner's going to go through and they're going to say, "Hey, you've checked out
one of three." When you check out the next one, it's, "Hey, you've checked out two of
three." So I feel that's really kind of a guided navigation in the end. Okay, now let's
add our information to our markers, and it's very similar to the process we went
through with a labeled graphic, just putting in text, basically. Alright, I'm feeling fancy,
and it's so easy, we might as well do it. Let's add a picture here, so we'll go up to
picture, 360-degree content library. Let's search for a community. That makes sense.
That one's kind of nice. And that was pretty easy, right? It didn't cost as much. What?
Maybe 20 seconds. Alright, let's go to the last one. Alright, let's make sure
everything's good. Like that one. Like it. And when you're happy with everything
you've put on your interaction, you'll select save and close. Now let's preview, shall
we? Alright, we've got our instructions. We know there are three items we need to
check out. Check out the first one. Scroll around. Working well. Two of three visited.
Nice. I really like this 360-degree interaction. I think you're going to get a kick out of
it, too. Consider using this interaction type when you want to give the learner the
opportunity to explore an environment.
Building the structure of a slider interaction

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- I'm going to walk you through the process of building a slider interaction, which is a
lot of fun. In this particular movie, I'm going to create the structure of the slider. In
subsequent movies, I'll create the layers and then the triggers needed to get those
layers to fire. Two core concepts of ours are creating visual interest and mixing up
the way you present material. A slider interaction allows you to do both of those. And
there's just something fun about moving something on screen. It's very game-like.
You might consider using a slider when you have content that falls along a
continuum, as this does, or if it falls in a logical sequence. Alright, so let's get busy
with building the structure of our slider, which will capture how prepared Prime
Energy employees feel as they finish up their onboarding. I will turn on the grid.
That'll help us keep us organized here. Let's insert our opening image, Control + J.
Move it up using the arrow keys. And I don't know about you, but this looks like
winter in California, would be my guess. There's a little bit of white there. So I'm
going to select the image and let's just go a little bit wider. Yeah, that seems to have
taken care of it. Let's put in our instructive text. To insert an active text box, click
where you want it on screen, Ctrl + T, keyboard shortcut. I've got this text in my
clipboard, so Control + V. Then we'll position it. See that cross hairs, that allows you
to position it. And we may monkey with this later, but for right now, I think we're
good. Control + I to italicize. I almost always italicize instructions. Okay, now's kind
of the fun part. We'll insert our slider. Insert. Makes sense, a slider is an interactive
kind of thing, so it's here under interactive objects. We'll select slider. I kind of like
this belty version, I'll select it. And then click and drag for how long you want it to be.
And release, and we have our slider. Now let's point out some of the format options.
Of course, this is Articulate Storyline, so you graphically inclined people should
rejoice, all sorts of formatting options for you. Thumb styles, the thing you move they
call a thumb. I kind of like that green one. And then you have the track. The track, you
move it along the track. Let's choose, I kind of like that darker blue. That might work
well. Yeah, that looks pretty slick. Choose that. And again, that's the track fill. Now
we will insert our continuum, which is basically moves from a grumpy face to a meh
to a happy face. So let's go get those. And they're all images or graphics, so Control
+ J. There's happy face. Let's drag where we want him. Oh, actually he's going to be
down here 'cause he's far right. So what will happen here is at a high level, they'll
move the slider, as it goes under the grumpy face they'll get some information, under
meh they'll get some information, and then under happy, they'll get some even more
information. And there'll be spots in between, say, grumpy and meh. Now we need to
adjust the properties of our slider so they line up with our grumpy, meh, and happy
faces. Let's select the slider and let's go to design. When you're working with sliders,
Storyline is creating a number variable in the background. And I will explain number
variables in a very simplified way. So first, talking about variables, we need to make
sure this item in the variable field matches this actual slider. So let's double check
that first. So this is slider one. This is the only slider we have, and it's saying slider
five here. So let's go, have it match slider one. That's going to help us. And then now
let's take a look at the start and end fields. A slider is kind of like a bus line in that it
has stops along the way. We want to create a slider that has six stops, stop zero,
stop one, stop two, stop three, stop four, and stop five. Stop zero is the stop where
the slider starts. That's the base layer where the learner gets instructions as to what
this interaction is all about. Stop one is grumpy. Stop two will be a spot between
grumpy and meh. Stop three is meh. Stop four is that spot between meh and happy.
And then stop five is happy or smiley face there where the slider ends. So calling
your attention back up here to the start and end, we want it to start at zero, right?
Because that's the base layer. And we want it to end, where do you think? We want it
to end at five 'cause we have six total stops and we're counting zero as a stop. So
again, zero, one, two, three, four, five. Okay, let's preview and move our graphics so
they line up with our slider starts. And just a heads up, we're going to be bouncing
between previewing, making tweaks, previewing, making tweaks. That's how this
type of work goes. All right, there's stop one. We need to move grumpy over. Stop
one, stop two, stop three. We need to move meh way over. Stop four, stop five. Okay,
smiley's cool, but everything else needs to move over, right? Yep. All right. So let's
see if we get lucky. We'll select grumpy, hold down Shift. Meh, move 'em over a little
bit. Preview. All right, we nailed it. So that's zero, one, two, three, four, five. Nice work
everyone. We've got the bones or structure of our slider interaction down. The thing
to do next would be to create our layers so we can give the learner information
based on how prepared they feel.
Creating layers for a slider interaction

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- [Instructor] We are working on a slider interaction that captures how prepared our
learners feel as their onboarding comes to close. We've built the structure of the
slider interaction. Now we have to build the layers so that when the learner moves
the slider to a certain spot, information is revealed. A slider interaction works like a
tabs interaction, but instead of clicking something to show a layer, you slide
something. Now we are going to create five layers and you can name the layers,
whatever makes sense to you. And if I call your attention to the slide layers panel
here, we're going to create those five layers and layer one, which is going to go right
above the base layer, will be called Not Prepared. And that's going to align to the
grumpy face. Layer two, will be called Somewhat Prepared, and that's going to align
to the spot between grumpy and meh. Layer three, will be called Prepared with Gaps,
and that's going to align with meh. And then layer four will be called Prepared, it'll
align with this spot between meh and happy. And layer five will be called Very
Prepared and align with the happy face. And again, you can name the layers,
whatever makes sense to you. So now we create our layers. Again, I'll call your
attention to the bottom right here. We'll select the new layer button, give it a name.
This is our Not Prepared Layer, Select Enter. Now let's bring in our picture for this
layer, Ctrl J keyboard shortcut. The not prepared picture. Use the arrow keys to arrow
it up. And again, I see a little bit of a gap, white gap there. Let's go format. Just make
it a little bit wider. Maybe one more wider format width. All right, that looks good.
Now let's lock the picture on the timeline, otherwise we're going to move it, 'cause
we're adding some text to it. Let's insert some text on this. So we'll select insert,
shape, rectangle will do. I have the text in my clipboard, so Ctrl V. And we'll format it
and change the background. Format shape, so I right click to format shape Solid blue
will work well. Transparency again about 30% is good for this type of work, select
Enter. That green line that doesn't bother, that's kind of nice actually, a little different.
You might want to get rid of that green line, but I kind like it, we'll keep it. Going to
add a little bit of text to this. This is the Not Prepared, this will be our title font. Okay,
so we have our first layer called Not Prepared. We need four more layers. So what
we're going to do, is we're going to duplicate this layer. We wouldn't want to create,
you know, four more bespoke layers. You know, we want to work efficiently. A best
practice of ours, we want to work from templates. And when you duplicate a layer
and tweak it, you're working from templates. But before we do that, we lock this,
right? So let's unlock it. And now let's duplicate the layer four times. One, two, three,
four. And now, it's a matter of just tweaking the layers that we created. So the next
layer is called Somewhat Prepared. Select Enter. And we're just going to switch out
the picture, right click. Replace picture from file, and Somewhat Prepared. Kind of a
nice image. And I got all these images from the content library. Change the text,
Control V to put it in. Okay, that looks good, we'll go to the next layer. This is called
prepared with gaps. Right click, we'll switch out the picture, change our text. Looks
good. Next layer, Prepared, select Enter, right click. Picture from file. I'm going to
change the text, and the last layer is very prepared. Select Enter to lock in the title,
replace the picture, change the text. Okay, let's check them out. We'll go from layer
one by one, so the base layer. Okay, I'm also going to turn the grid off, don't really
need the grid anymore. All right, so our base layer. So Not Prepared. Okay, we're
sorry to hear that. Somewhat Prepared. Okay, they get some more information,
prepared with gaps, which kind of aligns with meh. Okay. Prepared, looking good,
and then very prepared. And just a subtle graphic thing, I kind of went from gray to
green in all these. So if things aren't going well, things are going maybe a little bit
better, eh? It's okay. Yeah, the things are looking up, and then you have the green. So
a little bit of continuum there. So basically, here's how the interaction will work. The
user will slide the slider to grumpy. They'll get Not Prepared there. They'll go to meh,
and then they'll get Prepared with Gaps, and then they'll slide it over to Happy and
then they'll get the Very Prepared one with a few stops in between there. So right on,
we've created the layers containing our helpful information. The next thing we need
to do is add triggers to get these layers to fire when a learner moves the slider.
Creating triggers for a slider interaction

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- [Instructor] We are creating a slider interaction that captures how prepared our
learners feel at the end of onboarding. The learner will move the slider along our sad
to happy face continuum and then receive helpful information based on the layers
that we created. So we've built the structure and layers. Now it's time to create
triggers that will get the corresponding layers to fire. So I have the slider selected,
and I just want to point out in the timeline here at the bottom, this is Slider 1. This
becomes important as we talk about triggers. So let's get started creating our
triggers to get these layers to fire. So we're going to go up to the Triggers panel. We'll
select Create a new trigger. And when you're working with triggers, it's two
questions, right? What action do you want to have happen and when? So Storyline's
thinking for us. It says, "Hey, you've been dealing with layers. I bet you want to
(laughing) show a layer." And they're right. I'm going to move from negative to
positive or from Not Prepared to Very Prepared in my logic here. So Show layer, let's
say Not Prepared. When the slider moves, and that's Slider 1, which we have Slider 1
right there, that's what we want. If its value is between zero and five. That doesn't
feel right. Do you remember what Not Prepared or grumpy, what stop that was?
Yeah, it was stop one. So if its value is equal to one. And these are basically the
number variables. All right, so we have our first trigger. Slider 1 moves, you're going
to show Not Prepared when you get to that one stop, okay? Let's create the next one.
Show layer Somewhat Prepared. When the slider moves, Slider 1. If its value is equal
to, what do you think? Two, right? 'Cause this is stop two right here. All right, so
we've got Not Prepared, value one, Somewhat Prepared, value of two. Prepared with
Gaps, that's going to be our next one. That's going to be three. Slider moves, Slider 1,
equals to three. Prepared layer. Value of four. Okay. Last one: Very Prepared. And as
a best practice, before you preview, you just want to make sure your triggers are all
set. So slider moves, yep, Not Prepared at one, Somewhat Prepared, value two, Show
layer Prepared with Gaps, value three, Show layer Prepared, four, Very Prepared, five.
All right, let's preview. All right, that's Not Prepared, Somewhat Prepared, and then
Meh. But you see, you've got an issue in the background. It looks like our triggers are
working just fine, but we have this base layer image we're going to have to deal with.
And this often happens. The Meh layer, that looks good. That's Prepared with Gaps,
that's Prepared, that's Very Prepared. All right, let's deal with this base layer issue. It
looks like the triggers are working perfectly fine. So here's what's happening. We
have our base layer, right? And we have this gal contemplating the sunset. And that's
bleeding through our other layer. So when this happens, you basically just need to
hide the base layer object on your layer. And I'll show you how to do it. We'll go
through each layer. So Not Prepared, I'm going to bring up the timeline. I'm on the
Not Prepared layer. See this Base Layer Objects? We want to open that up, and then
just hide, I believe it's Picture 1. And then we'll do that for the remaining layers. Okay,
let's preview. Grumpy. Meh, Prepared with Gaps. Prepared. And Very Prepared, and
then, that base layer image is no longer coming through. So hey, we did it. We built a
simple slider in Storyline. Thanks for coming along that journey. I know there were a
number of steps there. If you want to add a game-like element to your courses,
especially where content falls along a continuum, give sliders a whirl.
Quizzing best practices

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- As e-learning developers, we all strive to create interactive e-learning, right? But to
that end, I think that many developers underestimate the power of a good quiz
question. A good quiz question challenges the learner, gets them interacting with the
content. Building quizzes is a minor art, so I'd like to go over a few best practices
that will help you use Storyline's quiz functionality to maximum effect. If you're
creating a traditional module, sprinkle quiz questions throughout. It's an easy way to
mix up the delivery of content, which is something we've stressed a lot in this course.
Speaking of mixing things up, I suggest you vary the types of quiz questions you ask.
Of course, you'll use multiple choice and true/false questions. Also work in drag and
drops, text entry, hotspot questions where you can. Get your learners recalling the
right answer instead of always just recognizing it. You do this by using a text entry-
type question in which the learner needs to remember the correct answer and type it
in. This recalling instead of just recognizing is a proven way to get the learning to
stick. Now, let's talk about answer choices. Make sure all your answer choices are
about the same length. If an answer choice is quite a bit longer than the others,
that's a dead giveaway it's the correct choice. Make sure your distractors, that is,
your incorrect answer choices, are plausible and not obviously wrong. Often you'll
need help from your subject matter experts on creating these plausible distractors.
Finally, when you have finished building an online quiz in Storyline, test it by getting
each question wrong and failing the test. This will show you the path the learners will
be forced to take when they answer an individual question incorrectly or if they don't
pass the quiz the first time around. Following these best practices will allow you to
get the most out of Storyline's quiz functionality.
Question types available in Storyline
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- [Narrator] There are 17 question types available in Storyline. And from Story View,
you find them listed under the Slides tab. The types of questions are categorized into
freeform, survey, and graded questions. I use six types frequently, so I'd like to
highlight those and give you some tips on using them. True/false. I'll use a true/false
to give the learner some confidence when dealing with complicated material or when
the question really only has two plausible answers. Don't overuse this type as the
learner has a 50% chance of guessing the right answer. Multiple choice. Of course
that's an option in Storyline. It's a very flexible type of question, but, again, don't
overuse it or else it'll give the learner bad dreams of lazy teachers and large lecture
classes they had to suffer through. Multiple response. Basically, this is a more
difficult multiple choice-type question. Some learners really struggle with this type.
To help learners from getting frustrated, I suggest you tell them how many choices
they are to select. Text entry. I use these when I want learners recalling information
instead of just recognizing the correct answer on screen. Recalling takes more effort
and thus helps the learning stick. Drag-n-drop. Learners love to drag stuff on screen.
This question type is great when you're placing things in categories. Call me
superficial, but I include a drag-n-drop in just about every module I build. And finally,
the hotspot question. These are effective in that they are the virtual equivalent of
touching an object. I use these a lot in software training and equipment training.
Storyline gives you a lot of question types. My advice is to get really comfortable
with six or so. That way you can mix up the way you assess your learners'
knowledge.
Creating a multiple choice question

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- [Instructor] I have a true false question here in my quiz scene, and now I need to
insert a multiple choice type question. So here I am in story view. We'll go to new
slide, graded question. Graded questions is the normal questions, like true-false,
multiple choice, et cetera. I'll give it a click. So I have two options here. I can go with
the more bare bones template for a multiple choice, or I can come down here, if I've
downloaded a slide template from content library, which I have, and I actually have
the velocity template that comes with a free trial version. I kind of like this version
they have here. I'll select that, and then select insert. And here is our multiple choice
question, the bones of which we didn't have to create. So with a quiz question, you
have two views. You have form view and then slide view. I'll talk about form view
first. Form view is really the under the hood view. I kind of think of form view as
where you create the guts of the question. So let me show you around form view.
Here's where your question is going to go. You have your answer choices right here,
and then you have your various, essentially feedback layers, correct, incorrect, and
try again if you give learners more than one crack at the question. So now I'd like to
call your attention to the top left here. I'm going to kind of move left to right, but
feedback and scoring questions. So you can provide feedback by question, but you
can also provide it by choice. For instance, and if you wanted to give the learner
some information on why choice B here was the wrong choice. I will choose by
question though. You can shuffle your answer choices, and I'll actually kind of turn
that on eventually when I build the bones of a question, and I choose shuffle more
often than not, really the only reason I don't is if there's a continuum, like your
answers are one, two, three, four, five, or something like that, you wouldn't want to
shuffle that, but more often than not, I do turn the shuffle on. Scoring, you can score
by question, or you could score by choice if you wanted to. Attempts, I almost always
give the learner more than one crack at a question, usually not more than three
because then they can just game the question. Another kind of cool thing is you can
think of a quiz slide like any other slide in Storyline. You can insert all types of media
and audio. Okay, so that's a rundown of form view. Let's go to slide view. Looks a
little different, doesn't it? Slide view is where you do your formatting. It's also where
your correct, incorrect, and try again layers reside. All right, let's go ahead and build
this multiple choice question, and to do that, we'll go to form view to begin. I have the
question in my clipboard, so I'll control V it in, and I'll put in my answer choices.
Venezuela is the correct answer choice. As far as the feedback layers, I'll just make a
minor tweak here to the correct. The rest of them I won't change. All right, let's look
at the feedback and scoring options. I'll select by question, that's what I want.
Shuffle? Yeah, why not? And again, essentially if the learner gets it wrong, then these
answers are going to shuffle, making it a little bit more challenging. Score by
question attempts to, sounds good. All right, now let's go to slide view. Again, slide
view is where you, essentially, do your formatting. I'll do a little bit of formatting to
this question. Let's get rid of quiz question. Don't really need that. And we'll remove
the header. You know, sometimes I might use that, but more often than not, I
probably won't, so I'll delete it. All right? And I'm fine with the type of question it is.
Another important thing, as we're talking about slide view, are the slide layers. Now
these are the correct slide layers, but if you come in and create a question and your
slide layers look different (chuckles) really than they should, to fix that, you just right
click apply layout, and then you can find the correct slide layers. These happen to be
what I want, but just the word to the wise, if your slide layers look different, you just
right click and then apply that layout. All right, let's preview. As a best practice, you
always get it wrong first when you're testing a question or a whole quiz. That way,
you can see what the true learner experience is. All right, that's right in that it's the
wrong answer, so we get the incorrect layer, we'll try it again. And now let's get it
right. All right, that's working as it should. One thing I want to fix, I'm not crazy how
this multiple choice appears in the menu. I actually want it to read, "Learning activity
two," so let's go fix that. And you fix that down here in the right, double click, and then
put in your name that you want. Enter. Preview one last time. Okay, learning activity
looks great. Again, we'll get it wrong first, and then right. And there you have it, the
world famous multiple choice type question, built in Storyline.
Creating a drag-and-drop question: Building the components

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- [Instructor] People love to drag stuff on screen. Don't ask me why. So if you're
feeling your module is a little flat, a surefire way to spice it up is to add a drag-and-
drop interaction. In this movie, I'll show you how to build the basic drag-and-drop
elements. So, here we are in StoryView. To get started inserting our drag-and-drop
question, we will go to New Slide, and then the drag and drop is the freeform type, so
we'll select that. So you have two options with drag and drops. You have the more
basic bare-bones drag-and-drop template that you could choose, or, if you've
downloaded a slide template from content library, as I've done, you could choose one
of these. But really looking at these, they don't really fit the bill here, so what I'll do is
I'll choose this more bare-bones template and then just make tweaks to it. So I've
selected it, I'll select Insert Slide, and then you're presented with a blank slide, which
is actually telling you something. So these freeform-type questions, you have to do a
lot of formatting, which I think is fun, and this blank slide is telling you, "Hey, get busy
building stuff." So let's do that. The first thing we're going to do is insert a layout,
essentially a slide layout for us. So we'll right-click off screen, we'll select Apply
Layout, I'll choose this one, and I built this up in Slide Master for this very reason. All
right, so it's looking more like our template here. I have the question stem in my
clipboard, so I'll Ctrl+V it in. So far, so good. Now let's create our answer choices. It's
essentially going to be four text boxes. So to insert a text box, Ctrl+T is the keyboard
shortcut, right? Do a little bit of formatting, bold it, and I need three more of these, so
instead of inserting three more text boxes, I'll work efficiently, hold down Ctrl+Shift,
I'm going to drag. See the little plus sign. So there will be two, let go of the mouse,
drag, there's three, let go of the mouse, and there's four. And the best practice when
you're creating these drag and drops, any important element you have on the slide,
name it in the timeline, and it's going to become clear in just a little bit why that's a
best practice. So this is an answer choice. This is Explosions, right? And we'll
rename it in our timeline, select Enter, and we'll create our answer choices and name
it in the timeline. And we'll do the final two. All right, we have our answer choices on
the slide and named in the timeline. Let's do a little formatting. I'll select all of these,
go up to Format, and we're actually looking at the align section here. We want to
distribute these vertically, and you can see these two and three moved just a scooch
there, so that looks all aligned, and they're all selected here, so I'm just going to use
the down arrows to move 'em down a little bit. All right, we have our answer choices.
Now it's time to insert our image. So to insert an image, Ctrl+J is the keyboard
shortcut, but let's go the long way. Insert Picture from File. Well, that's kind of big. I
like to go big with my images but not quite that big, so let's hold down Shift and we'll
do a little formatting with this. All right, that looks good. And, again, a best practice, if
you have an important item on the slide, name it in the timeline. We'll call this drop
target. Nice. We've built the drag-and-drop elements. The thing to do next would be
to go into form view and make those elements draggable.
Creating a drag-and-drop question: Building the interaction

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- [Presenter] So here we are in Slide View, we've built the bones of our drag and drop
interaction. We have our question stem right there, our correct and incorrect answer
choices, and the image to where our answer choices will be dragged, I call this the
drop target. At this point, it's time for us to go to Form View and set our items to be
draggable and indicate where they should be dragged to. As we're doing these tasks,
it'll become clear why we named things in the timeline. So let's head over to Form
View. Alright, let's set our draggable items and where they're going to be dropped to.
So it's fairly straightforward, I'll click into this and we'll select "Explosions". That's a
correct answer choice, so we want that dragged to the drop target, which is the
image. And you can see the preview right over here. Alright, next one is "VOCs".
That's another correct answer choice. We'll select the drop target. "Radiation". That's
actually incorrect, but we still need to select it here in the left because if we didn't, it
wouldn't be draggable. Last one, "Noise". That's a correct one. Let's take a look at the
feedback layers, right now we have just two, we've got "Correct" and "Incorrect".
That's fine, I might make some minor tweaks here. Now I'd like to point your
attention to the upper left here, the Drag & Drop Options. These are really important,
actually. Two I just want to highlight here. "Drag Item Options", "Return item to start
point if dropped outside", basically the drop target, I like to unselect that or keep that
unselected because if you selected it, your answer choice would snap back to its
original position and I don't really like that. The second one I want to highlight here is
"Snap dropped items to drop target". So when you do this, Storyline's going to want
to place it in a certain spot in the image, I don't want that either. I like the freedom of
the learner being able to drag it wherever they want, and I think that's part of the fun
of this. I like those answer choices, I like those options there that I've selected, I'll
select "OK". One last thing I want to point out, attempts. I generally give learners at
least two attempts, and when we select two, you're going to notice they then get a
"Try again" layer that we'll deal with in just a sec. Let's go to Slide View now. Okay, I
like the formatting here. Another thing you do in Slide View is you check out the slide
layers. Oh, these look a little different. This often happens. So these aren't the
"Correct", "Incorrect', and "Try again" layers that I want. So to change that, we'll select
the layer, right click, "Apply layout", and then grab the ones you want. So this is the
one I want, Velocity Feedback 01, correct? Yep. And our "Try again" layer. Let's
preview. Of course, a best practice of ours is always get it wrong first, so you can see
what that experience is for the learner. So we'll just drag everything. Nice. That's
working as it should. We'll try again. Beautiful. People love to drag stuff on screen.
Give the people what they want and include a drag and drop in your next module.
Creating a hot spot question

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- [Presenter] I really appreciate the artistic freedom that Storyline gives us with the
vast amount of quiz questions it makes available. One of my favorites is the
freeform hotspot question. It's so because it makes assessment questions more
visual, more representative of reality, and thus more engaging. So, let's build one. So
here I am in Story View. I want to build a hotspot question that asks the learner to
identify the solar inverter from the other equipment on the side of a customer's
home. So I will go up to New Slide, and the hotspot is a freeform question. We'll
select Hotspot, and then Insert Slide. Now, Storyline wants to bring us to Form View,
but I like to create these freeform type of questions starting in Slide View. Slide View
generally is where you're going to do your formatting and deal with your slide layers.
Okay, I'll get started by right clicking off screen and applying our layout. This one
should do. We'll make a few tweaks. I don't really need this green subtitle. I'll delete
it. I have the question stem in my clipboard, so I'll Ctrl + V it in. I might move this up
just a little bit using the arrow keys. Looks good. Let's insert our picture. Instead of
choosing this option, I'm going to use Ctrl + J. If I choose this option, it actually
wants to crop it, so that's not what I want to do, but I'll just do Ctrl + J. Bring it in that
way. That's what I want. To make this a little easier for me to work with, I will delete
this background box. Okay, so we'll drag it over. And again, Slide View is where you
do your formatting. That's not going to work, right? Having the text disappear. So we
want more of like a 60/40 layout, something like that. And that looks good. Got our
image. I like the way that looks. Now, a best practice of ours is creating visual
interest, and animations are a quick and easy way to do that, so let's just create a
little bit of visual flare here. We'll apply an animation. Selected the image. I'll go up to
Animations. And do you remember our default animation? It's a fly-in, right? Usually
it's from the left, but this image is really on the right, so I'll choose from the right on
this one. And our default is a little quicker. And our animation that we've been using
in this course is a little quicker, right? It's 0.5. And again, with your animations, just
write those down so you can be consistent. All right, so we've got our animation.
Now it's time to go to Form View. Form View, again, is really the under the hood view
of your question. It's where you put in your feedback, it's where you set your various
options, et cetera. In this particular case, we're going to add our hotspot here in Form
View. Pretty simple. Add a hotspot, a rectangle, since the inverter is rectangular.
We'll click and drag. The famous green Storyline hotspot there. Okay, that looks
good. Feedback, I'll just make some minor tweaks. Go to the top here, Attempts. I
almost always give learners more than one attempt. And when you select 2, as I will,
you get this try again layer. Let's go back to Slide View to see how things are looking.
All right, "click or tap the solar inverter "and then click 'Submit.'" All right, they're going
to click that inverter right there. Okay, let's take a look at slide layers. And again,
when you're in Slide view, you're often checking out your correct, incorrect, try again
layers. Now, these aren't bad, right? I mean it looks okay, but it's not really the one
that came with our template, so no biggie, and this happens fairly frequently. Just
right click, Apply Layout, and find the ones that come with your template. There we
go, there's my correct, incorrect, try again. Let's preview. As always, as a best
practice, get it wrong first so you can see what that experience is for the learner. And
then get it right. Hotspot questions have a way of making your quiz questions more
visual and thus more relevant to the learner. I use them all the time, especially in
equipment training.
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Inserting a Results slide in a quiz

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- [Instructor] I've built a short quiz. Now I need to insert a results slide, which will tally
the learner score and send that score to the LMS, that is, the learning management
system. So I'm in story view. To get started inserting a results slide, I'll go to Slides
and then Results. So really we have two options. We could choose the built-in results
slide option. If we chose that, we'd have to do a little bit of formatting. Now, the
second option is to use the results slide that came with our content library template.
And so we have this one and this one. They're both good-looking. I kind of like that
one. Quite the good-looking results slide. I'll select it, and then I'm going to select
Insert Slide. And here we go with our results slide options. Now, Storyline's pretty
smart. It's saying, "Hey, Daniel, "do you want to track all the questions "in your quiz
scene?" And I'm saying, "Yeah, thank you, Storyline. "That's exactly what I want to
do." So that's awesome. Couple of other quiz settings I want to call your attention to.
Knowledge check. That's basically I have a quiz, or it's a knowledge check. But I want
to point out that you could also do a pretest and track that. And this is really cool if
you want to give the learner the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge. So you
have a pretest or precheck at the very front of a module. If they pass that, boom, they
pass. They don't have to go through your course. And that's, I think, that's really
respectful. So something to think about. I like knowledge check. I'll choose that.
Other settings I'd like to point out. Quiz timer. Now, if you wanted to make your
assessment more challenging, you could throw a timer on it. That would challenge
their fluidity with the content. Down towards the bottom here talking about settings.
You set your passing score. 80 is the default, 80 is what I'll use. We'll select OK. Now
I want to point your attention to the slide layers down here on the right. So there are
three layers on a results slide. The base layer, which is where we are now, has most
of the elements that will appear on the success layer that the learner will see when
they pass and the failure layer that they'll see if they don't pass. So our work now is
to format our layers. Basically, see what's there. Do we want it there? Do we want to
hide it? So this is our base layer. Our options are review the quiz, print results, retry
the quiz. Now, review the quiz, we probably want that if they pass it, right? So we'll
keep that for now. Print results? Whatever. If they pass it or fail it, they should be
able to print. I think most people these days will grab a screenshot. But whatever, we
can keep that one. Retry the quiz. Now, I definitely want that if they fail it. So, so far I
like those three options. Let's go to our success layer. Now, let's assume they pass.
We might be a little happier in our messaging, a little exclamation point, you passed.
That's nice. Do we want them to be able to review the quiz? That's fine if they passed
it, right? Do we want them to be able to print the results? Sure, why not? Do we want
them to be able to retry it? Up to you. I don't have a strong inclination on that one.
We'll leave it. If they got an 80, want to 90, fine. Now, failure layer. Do we want them
to be able to review the quiz? Nah, probably not, right? So let's hide this. And we'll
hide this by going down to the timeline here. And, again, we're on the failure layer.
We're going to go under Base Layer Objects and we're looking for Review Quiz, and
we're going to hide that guy. There it is, we're going to hide him. So learners who fail
will not see that. They can still print results, fine, but we definitely want them to retry
it, right, if they fail it? Yeah, okay. So let's preview this whole scene. Again, a best
practice when you are testing a quiz, bomb it first. Okay, here is our results slide, and
it's the fail layer. Okay, so the score, we got a big fat zero. Passing score, 80%, good.
You did not pass. We could have created a more empathetic message there, but we
didn't. That's fine for right now. We can print the results if we want. We definitely
want to be able to retry it, right? We'll select that. Now let's pass it. All right, so this is
working as it should. So this is the success layer, right? We've got the score, we've
got 100, the passing score. We have a message there. We have the ability to review,
to print results, to retry quiz, everything that we set, everything that we want. Our
results slide is working as it should. The results slide included in Articulate Storyline
gives you a lot of flexibility, and it's really good-looking, to boot. I think you'll find
them easy and quite the pleasure to work with.
Adjusting slide properties and navigation

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in the video
- [Instructor] When you're getting ready to send your project out for review, you want
to make several passes through the whole thing. In particular, you want to ensure
that each slide has the features that it should and that the learner is able to navigate
through the module in the way that you intended. Making these passes gives your
work the polish of a professional. Let's first take a look at slide properties. You want
to pay special attention to the beginning and ending slides in a scene. Let's preview
this first slide in our course. Alright, now what do you think? This is the first slide in
the course. What can we remove? And this type of work, more often than not, is
about removing things. Well, what about this previous button? First slide in the
course, right, So there is no previous slide. Could delete that. Yep. Seek bar. We don't
have any audio, right? You don't hear any audio. So let's remove that. Could even be
misleading. So we'll remove the seek bar. and there's a subtle one on the top left.
And it's not the menu, it's the notes. So the notes is where the voiceover script will
go. So we don't have any voiceover, so we can get rid of that. So let's go make those
tweaks. And a great place to make those tweaks is Story View. So 1.1 is selected. I'm
going to call your attention to the bottom right here, slide properties. And this is
where you can basically uncheck stuff so it doesn't appear there. For instance, the
previous buttons, we'll get rid of those. Scroll down a little bit. Let's uncheck the seek
bar and uncheck the notes. And just so we make sure they have disappeared, let's
take a quick look. All right, no seek bar, no previous, no notes. Looks good. All right,
another little check. Let's go to the last slide in the course. Again, it's usually about
really looking at the beginning and endings of your scenes here. Let's preview this.
So same thing, this is the last slide in the course. What would you remove. Here, I
don't hear any audio, do you? I didn't, besides me. So I would remove the seek bar.
And we don't have a Next button. That's good. 'Cause it'll be the next button to
nowhere. And then notes, you know, if you don't have any audio, then you don't need
that notes. So let's go fix that. And again, story view is your friend for setting these
slide properties. So I have 3.3 selected. Let's go down to slide properties. Great, the
Next is off. We want that. Let's take off the seek bar, we'll take off the notes, and we
are done with that. Now let's look at our navigation. Again, story view is a great place
to do this. I generally wait to link my scenes together until the very end of
development. I get a better feel for what's in the different scenes when they are side
by side as they are now. But now it's time to link them and make sure the navigation
is right. So the link icon is going to be your friend. So I'm going to scroll down to the
end of scene one here. And I'll click on this and we'll get this little link icon. And
essentially I want to link this scene to scene two. So we'll click it, we'll say link to
scene two. And then we'll do the same thing at the end of scene two. I'll click on it,
get the link icon, link to scene three. And you can also check your triggers over here
in the Slide Triggers panel. But you can see that arrow, we're going from scene one
to two and then two to three. Now there are many slide and navigation settings you'll
need to attend to. Before you send your module out for review, plan to spend an hour
or two setting these. And remember, more often than not, it's about deleting items
off the player or the slide. Doing this type of checking will give your work the polish
of a professional.
Adjusting the course player tabs and menu options

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- [Instructor] Only when I'm totally done developing content do I worry about the
course player properties, but that time has come. So let's take a look at our player
features and menu options. To get to the player options from Storyview, select
Player. All right, let's talk through our player features here. Player tabs. So what's
nice about these Player tabs, you can turn them off and on and move them around.
Let me talk about a few I use all the time. And you'll see they are selected, Notes.
That's where our voiceover script will go. The Menu, that just shows the list of your
slides. You have the option for a glossary, if you'd like that. I have that unselect, but
you might like that. And then also, Resources where we put all of our job aids, quick
reference guides, et cetera. And again, you can move these things around. There's a
lot of flexibility. So I'll select Resources. You see it over on the right there. I'll select
this up arrow. And then boom, where'd it go? Well, it moved to the left and now I'll
move it back. And you see it. This Preview window's awfully nice. Another cool thing
is you can create a tab right here. We'll give that a click. And let's say you wanted an
FAQ tab. That could be good, right? Just select OK. And you'll have an FAQ tab.
Player Features. I have these all unchecked, but you might want the title. Now, let's
move down to Player Controls and I'll point out a few that I have selected here. Play
and Pause, right there. Volume, you know, I don't usually choose that. I think most
people raise and decrease the volume on their computer, so I don't think I need a
button for that. Captions, definitely. I use some closed captions in this course. And
you see that CC icon right there. Playback speed. This is a biggie and relatively new. I
would highly recommend you have that selected. If nothing else, as you're doing your
final reviews and you've seen this content, you know, 203 times, you can put the
playback speed on two, so it goes through your course double time as you're doing
your final review. And sometimes, you'll have a voiceover artist whose delivery is
slower than maybe most learners would like. And then they can, you know, put it to
1.4 and be perfectly happy. You know, maybe you do that with the audio books you
listen to. Accessibility controls is an option, accessible text, et cetera. Full screen, I
highly recommend you have that selected. I find that particularly important when you
have a screen recording and then your viewer can see the whole part of the software.
Search is an option. Seekbar, for sure. And then I generally allow the user to drag the
seekbar. Okay, now let's talk about the player menu. Up here in the top left here, I'll
give that a click. Now, fiddling with the menu should be the very last thing you do, as
the menu follows the naming and order of your slides. And I'll repeat that again.
Don't fiddle with the menu until you're done done. Very last thing you should do, and
it's a little trickier than it seems, but there are a lot of things you can do to dial in your
menu. For example, you can delete things. Slide 1.1, Opening Slide. They probably
don't need to see that in the menu, right? So we'll select Delete. You can rename
things. Objectives. Let's say I wanted to do, you know, Learning Objectives. Just
double click on it and change the name. Select Enter. There you go. You can indent
items. For example, let's take a look at 2.4 and 2.5 here. So 2.5 is really an extension
of 2.4. It's a scenario based on it, so let's indent it. That looks better. You can move
your scenes up and down if you'd like to. Move it up, move it down. You can collapse
your menu items for a much cleaner look. That looks way cleaner. And what's nice is
the menu will expand once the learner reaches a slide in that scene. And if you jack
everything up and you're like, my menu is a mess now because maybe I dealt with it
while I was still developing, you have a savior in the Reset from story. That will just
set it back to your initial state and then you can make your changes again. Really
important, once you're done dialing in your menu, here's your Save button. It should
say Save (laughs), but it just says OK. So once you're happy with everything you've
done, you're about to send this thing out, you've dialed in your menu, make sure to
select OK. Don't ask me how I know why that's so important for you to do. Just make
sure you select OK to save those changes. Storyline gives you a ton of flexibility with
your player properties. Now, adjusting your player and menu properties is a bit more
complex than it seems. So make sure it's one of the last things that you do.
Adjusting the course player appearance options

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- [Instructor] Let's continue tweaking the course player by looking at our appearance
options. Player style, I have modern selected, but if you are updating an older
storyline course, say from five, six years ago, you might want to choose classic. I
have my controls on. Now let's check out colors and effects. So the player itself, I
have the dark theme selected. You could go light, would really change things up and
you might want to experiment, you know, do a scene in dark and then see how it
looks on the light side. And then if you want to get custom, you certainly can. This
allows you to dial in that background color. So here are my theme colors. I could
choose one of those if I wanted to, but I kind of like the dark. That's what I'm going
with. Font, I generally choose my body font, which is Lato. Your body font is generally
more legible than your title font, so that's what I would recommend. Navigation
buttons, I've gone a little conservative to be honest with you. If you want to appear a
little bit more stylish, maybe just go Icon. I've done that before and that works really
well. But I've made my decision. I'm going with icon and text. That's what the client
wanted. Closed captions, some option here. My background is black, so the text
color is white. So that's what I'll choose, but you could choose something else if you
wanted to. And then the font for those closed captions again is Lato. And I have it on
the bottom. You could have 'em on the top if you wanted to. Let's explore text labels.
What I want to do is change the name of the notes tab. It's really where you place the
voiceover script. So I want to rename that tab, script. So in this situation, what you
do is just search for that tab. Here it is right here. I'll double click and then rename it
script. It's pretty easy, right? Update, preview. And there it is. So many of these things
on the player, you can change the name of. Always remember, and this is a little
tricky, it says Okay here. Once you are done with your appearance options, make
sure to select Okay, otherwise, your changes won't save. So I'll select Okay there.
Great. In my opinion, storyline gives you just the right amount of flexibility concerning
your player appearance. And we are done setting our player appearance properties.
Publishing options

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- [Instructor] When you're ready to publish your Storyline 360 project, you're going to
find that you have a lot of options. Let's walk through the most popular options and
when you might use each. To get to publish from Story View, just select Publish.
Publish to Review 360. This is Articulates Review site, a super easy way to share
courses and get feedback from stakeholders. Once you start doing reviews on
Review 360, I promise you, you won't want to do it any other way. Publish to Web.
You choose this option if you're placing your project on a website. Just to note, you
won't be able to track learners' results if you place a course on a website. Publish to
Video. You might choose this if you want to make a section of your course easily
accessible to viewers without the hassle of them going into the LMS. You might also
choose this option if you want to share your storyline goodness on social media or
YouTube. Publish to Word. This option converts your course into a Word document.
This can be helpful for the creation of a handout. I've also used this option for
storyboarding and for archiving purposes. Just to note, you'll need to edit the doc a
decent amount before anyone, but an instructional designer can make sense of it.
Publish to LMS/LRS. This is the most popular option, so much so I'll devote an entire
movie to it. Publish to Reach 360. This is part of every Articulate 360 teams
subscription. Reach 360 works in tandem with your current LMS and is a great way
to distribute your e-learning to a wide range of people. This includes contractors and
in the field workers who can access the content on any device. As you can see,
storyline provides a publishing option to fit your every need.
Publishing to an LMS

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- [Instructor] Most eLearning modules end up on some type of learning management
system, or LMS. That way a learner can be assigned to a module in their progress
track. Let me walk you through publishing your Storyline 360 module to the LMS.
And while I'm doing that, I'll point out some of the more important settings. To get to
Publish from Story View, just select Publish, and then LMS/LRS option. LRS, by the
way, stands for Learning Record Store. So, we're going to work from top to bottom
here. Title, self-explanatory. Folder, maybe not so self-explanatory. This is where
your published course, the published file is going to go to. The default is for the file
to be sent to the My Articulate Project folder, which is automatically created when
you download Storyline. But, if you've published something and can't find it, and this
has certainly happened to me, check your My Articulate Folder. I've created a
Bespoke folder I want it to go in. Working down our list here, we're using the Modern
Player Quality. A few things to say about this, I'll click into it. Video Quality Adaptive.
When you choose this, the system automatically adjusts the quality of the video
based on network conditions, which is generally a good thing. I would leave that
default setting checked. Moving down here, audio quality. Now this 56 kilobytes per
second is usually fine. But, I'll let you in on a secret. I'm kind of an audio snob. So I
boost it up to about 96, or so. That's Daniel's default. It's going to be a little bit richer.
Sure the file is going to be a little bit bigger, but it likely won't cause any issues. I've
been doing that for years, and no one's yelled at me yet. JPEG quality, default is
100%. That's what I recommend you leave it at. We'll select Okay. So you have some
choices on what you publish. I'll click in here. You can publish the entire project, a
single scene, or a single slide. It's really nice to have the option to just be able to
publish a single scene, or a single slide. So what happens a lot, the more
comfortable you get with Storyline, you'll be creating more complex interactions.
And, you'll want to test it on the LMS. Like, is this going to work well on the LMS? You
know, works on my machine fine, but LMS is a different beast. So you have the
option there. You just publish your small interaction, or even a small slide. So,
strongly consider doing that when you're building something complex. I'm doing the
whole project, I'll select Okay. Tracking. So there are three basic ways to track
completion of your course. The first one is by number of slides viewed. So you can
see there's 19 slides here. And if a viewer views all of them they get marked
complete. Now, if you chose this option, I'm just going to give you a pro tip here. Lop
off a slide or two. Because what will sometimes happen, is our learners are just
booking through these courses, right? And maybe they miss a buffer slide, or a
transition slide, or what have you. You just want to avoid those calls from learners
saying, "Hey, I went through your course, "and I didn't get marked Complete." Well,
they went through it, but they only hit 18 of the 19. So just lop off one or two. So,
that's one way you can track. Another way you can track, and probably the most
popular, is based on how a learner does in your quiz. And that's what I've chosen
here. And you can also track that third way, which is using a trigger. You might
choose this option. For instance, if you have a large scenario-based course, and the
learner gets all the way to that last slide. They've gotten through the scenario
successfully, there might be a trigger on there that marks the course complete. I will
choose when the learner completes a quiz, 'cause that's what I want, I'll select Okay.
Now, let's talk about some output options here. So SCORM 1.2 is the standard and
default. And it's generally what I choose. I think you're fairly safe choosing that 80%
of the time. But I do want to point out, we have some more modern standards here.
For example, XAPI and CMI5, that really record a greater range of learner activity. So,
those are options, as well. I'm comfortable with SCORM 1.2 Now, I've dialed in all my
published settings. I'm ready to go ahead and click Publish. This is a great time to
stand up and stretch. Use the bathroom, get more coffee, what have you. This can
take awhile. Storyline is basically compressing your assets, and placing them in that
folder that I spoke of above. (device chiming) All right, we got a nice little layer
message here. So, congratulations, it was published successfully. And it will let you
know if it was not. So, some options here. View the project, I don't really need to do
that. We could email it to someone. We could FTP it. We could zip it, which I
generally choose, or we could open it. I will select ZIP, because that's how I'm going
to upload to the LMS. It goes to that folder I designated. We'll select Save. (device
chiming) So in this folder, we have a zipped file, and a non-zipped file. I almost
always delete the non-zipped one. I hardly ever use it. At this point my work in
Storyline 360 is done. The only thing left to do would be logging into the LMS, and
uploading the zipped Storyline file that we just created.
Next steps

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- So what's next for you now? How can you keep on learning? Well, I've got a few
suggestions. Let's first talk about LinkedIn learning courses. If you want to continue
to hone your chops in Storyline, I suggest you check out David Anderson's "Articulate
360: Advanced Actions." David is excellent. If you're interested in how to digitize
learning, I suggest you check out my "Digital Transformation of Learning" course. Do
you need some help converting in-person training to online? In that case, watch my
"Converting Face-to-Face Training into Digital Learning." If you want to learn or
review the basics of designing corporate learning, you'd probably enjoy my
"Corporate Instruction Foundations." Okay, now let's talk social learning. Find a
community and share your work. You get better by sharing and receiving feedback.
One that I suggest you get involved in is Articulate's E-Learning Heroes Community.
It's the place to get help when you're stuck and to see what the leading practitioners
are doing with Storyline. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I often post stuff on Storyline,
digital learning, and instructional design, and would love to hear what you're up to,
your successes, the challenges you're facing, and when you complete a course of
mine, be sure to post the certificate and then tag me so I can share it with everyone.
Seriously, I want to know and will do everything in my power to share your
accomplishment. Thanks so much for coming on this Storyline journey with me, and
congratulations for completing the course.