Timer to use in Storyline

Nov 20, 2013

Paul Alders
By Paul Alders

As some of you probably know by know I'am developing a basic math course for primary and secondary school. The idea in this is that the learners have to help 'Chunky' around the world by passing several information points.

On each information point they can increase their knowledge about a certain topic. If they don't get this knowledge they can't help Chunky to the next information point. On each info point the learners can 'play' some games and take all the time that they need. After this they have to do an 'evaluation' about the things that they've learned by playing the games.

For this 'evaluation' I was searching for a kind of timer that I can use to measure their time. I couldn't find the right one so I designed one by myself. (you can see the timer in action by clicking on the image). If you like the timer feel free to use it in your own courses. The images that I've used are here

 If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know.

54 Replies
Kevin Thorn
over 10 years ago11/20/13 at 9:04 am (UTC)

Hey Paul,

Neat project and love the concept!

As for a timer, that's been one of those things that has been a requested feature in Storyline since day one. The only "timer" currently in Storyline is associated with a Quiz question slide. You can essentially build this entire thing in that environment with some limitations and sacrifices just to get a default timer included.

You could build a custom Flash timer and insert it as an SWF. You'd have to ensure the timeline in Storyline is set to the same length of the timeline in Flash.

Your solutions works fine though and looks great! 

Paul Alders
over 10 years ago11/20/13 at 9:58 am (UTC)

Hey everyone,

Thx for your response and feedback.

I really like Kevin's suggestion but I'am not sure if it will appear fluently on an IPad. I used some SWF for other issues, but it didn't work properly on the IPad. Maybe I did something wrong with the publishing.

Beside this it's very important that the course can be viewed on an IPad. Kids you know

Michael Hinze
over 10 years ago11/20/13 at 10:31 am (UTC)

Hi Paul, cool sample! Here is another style of timer. I did this a while ago for someone who wanted to have a lightbox displayed every 2.5 min. The timer (this version counts down, but it could be changed to count up) was done with layers and a few triggers on the master slide. And since it doesn't involve JavaScript or Flash, it also works on iPad.

Michael Hinze
over 10 years ago11/22/13 at 1:35 pm (UTC)

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro said:

HI All,

Paul and Michael, I really like both of your solutions and might want to use these at some point in courses. Can you upload the story files here? Or, the steps to achieve? Tx for sharing the "final" outcome.


Hi Rebecca, see attached my countdown timer version. I 'ripped' the timer out of another project, so it's rather messy, but I'm sure you figure it out

Matthew Kliewer
10 years ago03/13/14 at 6:48 am (UTC)

That's brilliant, Michael! Some creative thinking, there. It took me a second to figure out that it was using the length of the slide layers (half second each) to calculate the seconds. That's awesome.

The only problem I had was a little bit of "slipping", so by the time it got to the end of 02:30, it was off by a couple seconds. That's fine, though, if you don't need to-the-second accuracy.

I'm curious to try it with a longer course as an overall countdown timer, and see how it works.

Thanks again for sharing!

Sjoerd de Vries
almost 10 years ago04/29/14 at 1:12 am (UTC)

Michael, that solution is awesome. I was working with the timer as well and posted my solution here: http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/48466/260392.aspx#260392

Your's is a neat way to use variables. Mine is more time consuming and are just images on the timeline.

It's really a pity the search function on this forum is crap. If you search "timer" it does not give any results on my PC. So I will create a link back to this topic in my post as well. Makes it easier to find.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
almost 10 years ago04/29/14 at 8:09 am (UTC)

Hi Sjoerd,

Thanks again for sharing that here. In regards to the search functions, it's something our Web team is aware of and working on fixing for a future update of the ELH site. In the meantime, you may want to use the method described here by Adrian to search the forums.  It's what a lot of staff use to help narrow down our search and will pull forum posts, articles, tutorials, etc. 

Miranda Verswijvelen
almost 9 years ago05/21/15 at 2:20 am (UTC)

Hi Michael,

This is a great solution for a timer, thank you!

It is strange how trying to do that with only one layer seems to create the 'lagging', while switching between layers doesn't do this at all. I have used this for a game where reaching the 'solution' then stops the timer by hiding both timer layers and showing the variable with its current value on the base layer. Works perfectly.

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