Importing PowerPoints into Storyline 360 Font Size Issues

Hi Ari.  We're doing much the same process at the moment so I hope I can help.

The story size appears to determine the font size, ie it is scaled to suit your dimensions.  We worked out the font size we wanted in our story and then saw what we were getting when importing from PowerPoint.  We then did a bit of trial and error to work out what to set the font size to in PowerPoint before importing.  After a few tries we had a new template to apply to the PowerPoint file before importing it.  This included font, font size and font colour.

Once imported, the font you get is what you wanted in the first place.

Templates (layouts) in Storyline are pretty tricky and don't work at all like I expect templates to work.  What is imported will not 'react' to the template like you might expect (take on the layout, be able to be reset etc) so you need to get it right in PowerPoint first otherwise you have a slide-by-slide job to fix it all.

So, set up a new template in PowerPoint and apply that before import.  That's what we're doing.

Paul

Thanks Paul.  I will give your suggestion a try, but I feel Articulate needs to fix this.  I just don't see creating a new template and applying it to hundreds of PowerPoints as a feasible work around.   

Hi Paul.  What I have figured out may be of help to you as well.  When opening a new Storyline project, the default aspect ratio is 4:3 at 720 px by 540 px.  When you import a PowerPoint most likely your PowerPoint slides are not the same size.  So when Storyline brings in the PowerPoint it increases or decreases the font size to adjust accordingly.  (Note to programmers: In my eyes this is not the best way to go about it.  Maybe, automatically adjust the slide size to match what is being imported instead of corrupting the design and layout.)  

With that being said, I have found a way that works without having to do anything with templates or layouts.  First, figure out the size of your PowerPoint slides in pixels. Create a new Storyline file.  Once you've created the Storyline file, change the slide size in Storyline to exactly match the slide size (in pixels) from PowerPoint.  Import your PowerPoint into a new scene.  After, delete the original scene that was created when you first opened a new Storyline.  When I do this, my font sizes are not changing on import.  My slides are 13.333 inches by 7.5 inches in PowerPoint, So I need to make my slides 1280 pixels by 720 pixels in Storyline.  

Hi Ari.  Thanks, that sounds good.  We've struggled a lot with how the import works and how layouts work (or not!).  Ideally, you could apply a layout to a bunch of slides and they would all take on the placement, font etc, but this is not the case.  Text that deviates from what is on the layout won't be affected by the layout or a reset.  Quite different to ppt!

We are also changing font and font colour so we needed a global way to do that rather than having to modify each slide.  Making that change in ppt works for us.  We are also changing the aspect to 16:9 and this adds a few more challenges too.

Good luck with your project.  It is much more manual than we would have liked, which I know you're finding too!

Paul