Considering SL3

Oct 03, 2017

Joyce Hensen
By Joyce Hensen

I'm a Studio/Presenter and SL2 user.  Since SL3 is available I'm considering trying the 30 day trial to see whether our team should request funding for the update.  Before I do the install, I have three questions:

1. Someone told me that installing SL3 makes SL2 (or Presenter??) inoperable.  Is that true?  If so, does uninstalling SL3 (after trial use) make the other programs work again?

2. Is SL3 backward compatible to SL2?  This is important in case I build a course or two in SL3 and we are not able to purchase (or decide against) SL3.

3. Are files from SL1, SL2 and Presenter compatible with SL3? Our team has many courses that were developed in Presenter and in SL 1 & 2.  We need to be certain that courses could still be edited in (or imported into) SL3 if we make that upgrade.

Thanks for your input!

3 Replies
Walt Hamilton
over 6 years ago10/03/17 at 6:57 pm (UTC)

1. You can install and use all of those programs on the same computer at the same time.

2. Absolutely NOT. NONE of them are. Be very careful. Any work you do in SL3 or 360 will be permanently lost if you do not buy them.

3. Open a SL2 .story in SL3, and it asks if you want to update it. If you do, it updates it and makes a backup that can be modified in SL2. The theory is that it does the same for SL1, but I've seen posts here that suggest that there may be bumps, and I can't speak to Presenter, but I suspect it is supposed to be compatible.

Leslie McKerchie
over 6 years ago10/04/17 at 2:04 pm (UTC)

Hello Joyce! Looks like Walt has addressed your concerns and hopefully that is helpful.

I just wanted to share a few additional items:

1. What you may have heard is that various versions of Studio cannot exist on the same computer. This is due to Presenter being a PowerPoint plug-in, but you can have all iterations of Storyline on the same computer :)

2. They are not reverse compatible with previous versions due to new code/features. When you upgrade a file during your trial though, the current backup version will be saved. So any updates/additions would not be in this backup obviously, but you haven't lost the original file that's compatible with your current version.

3. You will be able to upgrade content from SL1 and SL2 and you will be able to import your Presenter project to convert to Storyline if you wish (as that's not a 1:1).

Many of these questions (as well as some you might not have thought of) can be found in our FAQ document here.

Hope that helps :)

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