Can unused slides be excluded from the exported project?
Mar 27, 2023
I have a Storyline project that needs to be exported as several different versions. The project has dozens of slides, however rarely all of them are included in each of these versions. In other words, each version uses a certain set of slides within that project.
The way I do this is I have a set of variables which determine what slides will be skipped and which will be used. For example, a certain slide might show only if the default values for variable x=2, variable y=4 and variable z<10.
This is the only way to achieve this, as there are way too many combinations of variables involved.
This works perfectly, however all slides are always included in the exported project, even those slides that are (and can) never be reached. This means that regardless of how many slides each version has, the file size will always be for the total slides.
Is there a way to make sure these unused slides are excluded from the exported project?
4 Replies
Hi Daniel,
Great question! You’ll want to continue to keep your files set up exactly the way you have them especially since it's working so well for you. Currently, the options available for excluding slides from the published output are to publish a single scene or a single slide. Excluding slides based on which variables are chosen sounds like an interesting idea that I can share with our product team.
Thanks for reaching out!
What do you mean by exported? Making new .story files out of what exists, or publishing to run. If you are making new story files, how do you decide which files to use and which to leave out? If you manually determine which ones you want, Create a new project and import into it the slides you need. You can choose them individually. A method that is probably more reliable is to copy the .story file (when it comes to duplicating files, File Explorer is pretty fast and more trustworthy than SL), then delete the slides you don't need.
Which method you choose will probably be determined by how complex the project is and whether you are using more slides, or leaving more slides.
Sorry I should have said "Published", not Exported!
Publish a single scene (even if you have to make a copy of the project, and artificially divide it i into scenes) or two, and see if the difference in size is worth the effort.