A list of issues that corrupt projects

Nov 20, 2020

Since starting to use Storyline a few years ago I've encountered numerous different issues, which have remained unresolved and been explained by the project becoming 'corrupted'. 

Here's a list of all the issues we've experience to this point (all of which remain unresolved), as well as causes (as far as I can tell) and workarounds. I thought this list may be helpful to avoid future corruption. I'll continue to add the to this list as and when we come across issues. We've been encountering issues on an almost daily basis recently.

Master slide triggers become un-editable

Issue - Whatever master slide you click on, the trigger panel will only show for one of them. For example, if you had three master slide layouts called A, B and C, whichever one you click on, only the triggers for master slide A  will show, meaning you can't edit any triggers for master slides B or C.

Cause - Seems to be caused by copying and pasting slides from other projects. 

Workaround - Import all slides into a new project. Any jump to slide triggers will need to be re-programmed and any player, story size and theme settings need to be re-done.

Images stop showing

Issue - Random images in the project stop showing. They're still on the timeline and still in the media library, but don't show in the project, even when published.

Cause - Not sure what the cause of this is. It happened after the project was published.

Workaround - Re-import all the images. Obviously this involves re-positioning and re-sizing them, setting up all the triggers again, setting up states, etc.

Storyline crashes when right clicking text boxes

Issue - When highlighting text and right clicking the program crashes and has to be restarted.

Cause - Not known. Seems to only happen on certain textboxes. Can't figure out why.

Workaround - Don't right click the textbox.

Quiz variables break

Issue - The 'Results.ScorePoints' variable changes to 'Broken' and is unusable.

Cause - Seems to be from copy and pasting the results slide (Storyline really doesn't like copying and pasting).

Workaround - Create a new results slide. This will create a new set of quiz variables and bring back the old ones. You'll need to re-program all the triggers associated with the variables.

I've given up on reporting the issues to engineers, as the response is always the same - the file has become corrupted, there's nothing we can do. It would be really helpful if you could look at stopping these things happening to begin with. Or at the very least let us know what the program is incapable of, so we can avoid it.

1 Reply
Tom W

Got another couple of bugs we've discovered over the last few weeks to add to the list:

Videos place themselves above other objects

Issue - A series of videos randomly decided to always jump to the front of the timeline when published, even though they were placed behind objects. Randomly happened one day.

Cause - No cause.

Workaround - No workaround.

Table height locked

Issue - The height of a table or the rows in it can't be adjusted.

Cause - No cause.

Workaround - Don't use tables.

We've added tables to the list of Storyline functions that are unusable.