Import translation when Notes tab is empty

Mar 13, 2017

Michel Guenette
By Michel Guenette

I have been recording videos with Articulate Storyline 2, which means that my slides do not have notes when they are created. I have studied the unique identifiers for the slides that Storyline creates and I noticed the following pattern:

{bmp_<GIBBERISH>.Name} == Slide title

{bmp_<GIBBERISH>.Notes} == Slide notes

Because I draft my speaker's notes in a separate Word file, I want to perform the fewest number of copy/paste actions between the two programs. (I use a 3-column table structure in order to emulate how Storyline creates the Export file.)

What I am noticing is that if the Notes tab is empty, i.e. 0 characters, and I see the default instructions, the import process does not recognized my text. However, if I type a single character, like "a", and then perform the import process, my notes are pulled in as expected.

I looked at the xml code for a couple slides. The <note></note> tag is unique and the text contained within is pseudo-xml (when it is not empty). In other words, symbols like < and > are written as &lt; and &gt;.

Without typing the letter "a" in nearly 100 slides, is there a better way to use the import process to insert text into the Notes tab? Might it be possible to write "a" in pseudo-xml in the Word document that I use to import?

Thank you.

3 Replies
Michel Guenette
almost 7 years ago06/07/17 at 6:11 pm (UTC)

I had been meaning to return to see if any more answers were provide. I guess not. But, not all is lost.

I have been doing more research on my own. I managed to find some code snippets for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) that deal with xml code. Now, I am able to automatically insert a string of characters, of my own choosing, into an empty <note></note> tag.

Here is how I did it.

  1. Record the video and allow AS2 to create the separate slides in a new scene.
  2. Save and close the file.
  3. Go to the folder where it is saved (Normally, it is "My Articulate Projects" in my user profile).
  4. Select and duplicate the file (Copy and paste back into the same folder).
  5. Select the copy (Note: the string " - Copy" will be appended to the original file name.)
  6. Rename the file by adding ".zip" after ".story". Accept the warning about an unusable file.
  7. Open the ZIP file.
  8. Browse to the xml files for the slides (story > slides).
  9. Select all of the slides and place them in a folder of your choice (like a temporary folder that you will delete when you are done).
  10. Create a list of the files using DOS. (At the moment, it is the only method that I know because I have not delved deeper in the VBA to find a more elegant solution.)
    dir *.xml /-c > list.txt
  11. Open the Notepad text file and copy the list to your clipboard (Edit > Copy OR Ctrl+C).
  12. Paste the copied text and remove the modified date and file size data using your favourite text editor. (I use Word because of Find and Replace with wildcards.)
  13. Select and sort the paragraphs alphabetically from A to Z.
  14. Copy and paste into a new Notepad text file. Save it in the same folder as the xml files. (My preference. Everything is in the same place.)
  15. Execute the VBA macro from within Word. (I chose Word because I am very familiar with the object model and I have other code modules that I was able to exploit.) [Sorry. I do not have the code in a clean format that I can share with the community at the moment.]
  16. Select all of the slides and place them back into the ZIP file. (Do not include the text file that you save there.)
  17. Close and save the ZIP file.
  18. Rename the ZIP file by removing ".zip". Accept the warning about an unusable file.
  19. Open your Storyline project.
  20. Verify that the macro was successful and go to a slide that you know did not have any speaker's notes on it when it was created.
  21. Delete the temporary folder that you created if you are satisfied with the results.

The reason, that you want to create a copy of the original file, is to have a backup in case the copy becomes corrupt because the xml code has errors in it. You can delete the original if you are satisfied that all of the project is loading properly and without errors.

I know that it may seem like a long and convoluted process, but when you have potentially hundreds of slides that need to be updated with existing speaker's notes, and the current process with Storyline 2 is insufficient to the task, you look for other methods in order to accomplish the same thing. I am not in the mood to manually select, copy, and paste speaker's notes between slides. Double that when you have to work in a second language and you are looking at thousands of slides.

Thank you.

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