Can I build an Excel worksheet into Storyline?

Oct 03, 2017

Hi all -

I have been looking today at linking out to an Excel worksheet from a Storyline project. It seems from testing that there is no issue with creating some kind of trigger that will activate a download of the worksheet for the user to open in Excel, but more specifically what i would like to know is: 

Can I embed an Excel worksheet into a 'web object' type window so that the user is not diverted away from the course and can scroll through and interact with Excel through the Storyline slide itself? Much like opening a web object...

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 

4 Replies
Kenneth Ham

You're probably going to run into cross origin issues.  The other problem I've had happen to me is that our intranet uses URL masking in a way that Storyline thinks that the URL is not properly formed, and won't accept it as an address for a web object because there isn't a .com (or any other generic top-level domain identifier) in the browser address.  For example, our intranet address might look like http://something/folder/file.html

You also may have issues with secure/insecure connections, since things review are https:// prefixed, while your intranet might  be http://, and the security level drop is usually flagged and blocked in most corporate environments.  One way around all of the above is to host the file on an internal server that is http://, and serve the HTML5 output from Storyline on the same intranet server, which eliminates the cross-origin problem, the https:// to http:// security issue, and the malformed URL.

Another work around is to host it on a SharePoint document server (if your company uses something like that), and use the file URL that SharePoint provides.  Since user authentication is most likely baked into the company's SharePoint, the URL would not resolve, but for those on the intranet (or via VPN), the web object would show as expected.

I've also resorted to just adding a manual link to a page that opens in a new window when I have something on our document server that won't link up as a web object, because the new browser window will manage the redirect according to the intranet DNS.

Hopefully that helps you find a solution, or at least understand the problem better so you can talk to your IT department to figure out a solution.

You could always get fancy and fake it with some extra clever effort, input fields, and javascript.

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