Blue Box

Jun 27, 2012

I'm working on a presentation that consists of  63 PowerPoint slides, plus an Engage slide. I'm having a particular problem with two PowerPoint slides. Both slides are reasonably full of text/images, but they are not that different to many other slides in the set. When I publish the course, a blue box appears as a background covering the bottom half of each slide.

In order to try to fix the problem I copied these two slides into a separate file and published. Everything appears as it should. I thought perhaps that the problem was being caused by having overlapping elements on the slides, but many other slides are similar, and don't have this problem.

From researching the forum I see that one suggested fix is to convert the slide contents to an image, but when I do this it is obvious that the text is not as sharp as on other slides. I can't convert these slides to Engage because the designer wants them to match others in the set.

Any ideas please?

16 Replies
Peter Anderson

Hi Alan,

Would you mind sending us your files so we can take a closer look? Please create an Articulate Presenter package, then upload the zip file to our server. You can review how to do this here: 

 

Send to Articulate Presenter Package – Articulate Presenter ’09 Help

 

Upload the resulting zip file from your computer to our server using this upload form: 

 

Articulate Support - Upload Your Files for Review 

 

Thanks!

Christine Hendrickson

Hi Tom!

In Alan's case, it looks like it was an issue with the actual file. From what I can see in the case history, he was able to resolve the issue by creating a new presentation file and copying the content over to the new course. 

Can you tell us a little more about what's happening for you, please?

Thanks!

Aaron Abramowicz

I have the same problem with those blue rectangles showing up where they are not supposed to be on what seems to be every project...

I have found that if I try publishing enough times, I eventually get lucky eventually and the boxes don't show up. This is a tremendous waste of my time and I wish I knew why they were there, and what I could steps I could take to not have them generate in the first place. I'm sooooooooooooooooooo tired of publishing my projects 18-20+ times before I get a usable version. 

Millie Marchetti

I have over 200 courses published as SCORM using Articulate suite 09. I need to republish all of them in AICC version and so far all of the ones I republish are giving me this blue squares that do not show up in the preview but on the final published version. Can you PLEASE! help me with a better solution than copying content in a new power point and reinsert interactions and quizzes? I must finish this project within 3 weeks and some of the courses are 60 to 120 minutes length. Thanks! FYI I also own Articulate suite 13, would that help if I open them in your new version?

Leslie McKerchie

Thanks Millie. Have you tried the above method with one of your courses? Please be sure that you are working locally as well. Are you working in a collaborative environment as Alan mentioned above?

When working on an Articulate Presenter course in a collaborative environment with other developers, we recommend following this workflow to avoid file corruption, loss of resources, and other erratic behavior.

Millie Marchetti

Leslie,

We NEED to keep in the external drive an unzipped version for different reasons, being just one, the fact that we use to upload the course the zip published version only. How would this work. Are you wording on fixing this limitations? We really need to be able to open close, edit and republish our courses from anywhere in the building from our rackstation/external drive.
We have ALL our courses already in an external drive (over 200) and we did not package them to put them there as the 'workflow' suggests because we did not know that. I tried to republish from there and the blue boxes are all over the place. I moved 10 over my local drive and they are experiencing the same problem. What would be my solution for this amount of courses without having to practically re-build them.
Thank you for your time!
Leslie McKerchie

Hi Millie! Is your software on your local machine?

I would test one of the courses and see if the issue is resolved. Follow the following steps:

  1. Open a blank presentation in PowerPoint.
  2. Save the presentation.
  3. Click the Home tab.
  4. Click the drop-down arrow beside New Slide and select Reuse Slides.
  5. Click the Browse button and select Browse File.
  6. Locate your original PowerPoint file and click the Open button.
  7. At the bottom of the Reuse Slides panel, select the Keep source formatting check box.
  8. Right click the first slide in the Reuse Slides panel and select Insert All Slides.
  9. Save the new presentation and republish.

Note: Resources, such as audio and video, that you inserted via Articulate Presenter into the original presentation will need to be inserted again into the new presentation. You may need to export the narration from your original presentation. Then import it into the new presentation.

Jonas Brolin Hjortsberg

Hi, 

I had the same problem. When republishing some courses to work with latest internet explorer I got blue boxes on two slides. I tried to do all above but nothing worked. Now I tried republishing on a Windows 7 computer and voila it worked! No strange boxes. 

The machine that DID work:
Windows 7 sp 1, Articulate studio 09 v6.3.1402.0316 pro update 10, Office version 2010 v 14.0.7147.5001(32-bit), Flash player 17.0.0.169.

The machine that did not work:
Windows 8.1 pro, Articulate studio 09 v6.3.1402.0316 pro update 10, Office version 2010 v 14.0.7149.5000(32-bit), Flash player 17.0.0.134.

I tried updating the flash player on windows 8 and thought it worked, but it seemed to be a random issue. But when publishing from the Windows 7 it works always.

Regards Jonas

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