Allow Selecting View Order from the Menu

Hi John

I would create my own menu and de-select the menu in the Player

This way you can have triggers and variables that control what and how you want the menu to work

Thanks Mr. C,

However, that sounds a lot more time-consuming than deselecting an option somewhere.

Is your suggestion to take up screen real estate with the menu, or is there some way to use the existing menu panel that is to the left of the screen used for content?

There is not a built in function for this control of the menu. 

You could disable the menu on the initial slides (but this will give an odd aspect ration for the player if you are using the side bar).

To do this select custom for the player either in slide properties or in story view for those slides.

Thanks Phil,

At the same time, I agree with your concern about the distorted aspect ratio. Whatever is done should be consistent throughout the entire lesson.

The other option is to build your own menu. You could also add a feature request as I can see a lot of people who would benefit from this.

John, I am not completely sure that I understand what you are seeing in your menu, but to me, it sounds like you want "Free" navigation in which there are no restrictions on which menu item a learner can click at any time. If that is so, Storyline supports that directly.

These instructions are for Storyline 360, but I assume Storyline 3 is the same (and probably similar or the same in earlier versions of Storyline too):

Go to the Slide View for any slide, and on the Home tab, click Player. In the Player dialog, click Menu (it's on the ribbon at the top of the Player menu). Below the display of your menu on the left, there is a gear symbol. Click that to open the Menu Options dialog. Then, from that Menu Options dialog, use the drop-down list to change the Menu entry to Free.

Now your learners should be able to go anywhere in the menu without restrictions.

Cheers!

    -Ray

Thanks Ray,

Finally have this figured out (the menu had been set to "Free" all along): A workaround at least, even though I don't understand why a workaround is needed.

RE: Problem:

The situation was caused by wanting a final Review to appear on the menu as a single item (no ability to jump right to specific questions). The review was set up as a separate scene, which was included in the menu, and I then deleted from the menu all questions (specific slides). On the published lesson then, clicking "Review" on the menu, instead of taking the learner to the review, took the learner through every slide in turn, until all had been seen and the learner got to the review.

Random access worked for all other items on the menu: Only clicking review forced going through every slide that had not yet been seen.

RE:Solution

The solution was to delete the existing "Review" item on the menu. Then use the folder icon at the bottom of the Menu panel to "Insert from project" and add back the Review scene. Then delete all review slides except the first one and also delete the name of the scene as a menu item. Then rename the single remaining slide "Review" and promote it to the same level as other scene names.

Random access now works for all menu items.

RE: Why?

No idea why the initial menu configuration forced a review of all other slides before showing the review slides, especially because the navigation option was set to "Free." Seems more like a bug than something anyone would intentionally want to do. But at least there is a workaround: Make the entry a slide rather than the name of the scene.

Hi there John! I'm glad you got it all sorted. It's hard to say without seeing your file why the initial menu configuration forced a review of all other slides before showing the review slides. If you'd like us to take a look, you can attach it here!

Thanks Alyssa,

I appreciate you taking an interest. I have left in just enough slides for you to see what is happening and removed some on the content on those.

Preview the whole show, then, before viewing any of the other slides, on the menu click the item at the bottom "Review." That will open every slide in order before letting you see any of the review slides.

Hi John.  I had a quick look at your file, and to troubleshoot, I removed the slides under the scene headers for "Ion Exchange Chromatology" and "Stages."  So the menu looked like this:

And when I click on either of those sections with no slides showing in the menu, the same behavior occurs.

We'll get this behavior documented, and I'll update this discussion if there are any changes.

Thanks for posting your solution for anyone else who happens upon this issue!

Hey John.  It looks like we did have this issue documented, so I'll share some other relevant information here as well.

The issue is happening with custom menu headings, where we would expect to jump to the first slide in that scene when the header is clicked.  Instead, as you noticed in HTML5, you are returned to the place in the course where you left off.

It varies slightly between Flash and HTML5 output:

• In Flash, clicking the heading will hide or collapse the menu but navigation doesn't work.
• In HTML5, clicking the heading will hide or collapse the menu but will jump to the next slide from where you left off.

Great news, everyone. We just released Update 8 for Storyline 3!

This release includes a fix for the issue Crystal mentions above where clicking a custom section header in the menu didn't jump to the first slide in that section.

You can download the update here and see what this version has to offer here!

Thanks Katie,

We are using Storyline 360 now. Are these same fixes also being applied to that version?

Hey there, John. Thank you for your update!

We released a fix for the same issue in Update 31 for Storyline 360. Let me know if you're running into any trouble on this or any version after that–happy to help!