I thought I’d share a few of little tips that have truly saved my life (well, a lot of time anyway) so to speak in Articulate Storyline, hopefully they will help you too.
Working for an eLearning development business, we are often asked by clients to restrict users from moving forward in the course until any audio has been completed. That’s an easy one – use a true/false variable applied to the media, then a condition applied to the next button. BUT, what happens if you want to change a bunch of audio recordings (for example the client changes the terminology they use, and want to refer to ‘organisations; instead of ‘businesses’)? If you delete the media and reload the new recordings, you then need to adjust all the variable triggers to refer to the new audio file – aaarrrgghh what a pain!
As with pictures, I was looking for the ‘Change Sound’ option on right-click of the speaker icon, and had assumed that this option wasn’t available. UNTIL I discovered the ‘Change Sound’ button in the Sound Tools! This handy little button allows you to replace the old file with the new file, and retains all the original settings, formats, links to triggers/variables etc, as the Change Picture option does for image adjustments. VOILA! Easy as pie when you know how!
Another great tool is the Audio Editor, where you can select an audio file, and modify it by adding in silence, removing words, and even cutting in other recordings to create one seamless audio file – this one’s great to have a play with!
The last tip I wanted to share with you was something that confused me for quite some time, and had me re-building entire slides (well ok, it only happened once – thank goodness for clever colleagues!) I had been given a project with the slide below, where you could see one of the layers from the base slide – very weird! I thought this must be a Storyline glitch (although I do remember being told once, a good workman never blames his tools!)
What I saw on the base slide
I could see one of the layers from the base slide, and I thought Storyline was broken! Until my clever colleague directed my attention to the eyeballs at the left of the layers in the layers panel:
Layers
See how the layer is visible, but we’re viewing the base slide? Turning the layer visibility off meant I could avoid having to re-build everything!
Actual base slide
This feature is actually a useful tool in Storyline, because it allows you to check your alignments between layers and base slide, so you can keep everything consistent across your course.
I know, seems logical, but this seriously had me baffled, and no amount of Googling could help me figure it out – hence the re-building!
Hopefully someone, somewhere finds this useful, and it saves you some time in the future!