Layering on slides to reduce the total number of slides.

Oct 17, 2012

Jesse Kramer
By Jesse Kramer

I'm trying to take advantage of the layering options in SL. I have a bunch of information I want to convey to my learners and instead of creating a new slide for each piece of information I thought I would do it by creating a series of layers instead. In order to reveal the next layer I wanted users to click on the Next button but each time I create a trigger it keeps only showing up on the base layer. Does what I want to do require a separate button I would create for each layer or can I use the next button in conjunction with variables? Let me know if I'm not being clear with what I want to accomplish.

On a side note, I'm wondering if by doing this I might reduce the total size of my project or is that not really feasible since the total ammount of information here is the same it's being organized differently?

Jesse Kramer

3 Replies
Brett Rockwood
over 10 years ago10/15/13 at 10:35 am (UTC)

Sonya, you can start here with the many tutorials the Articulate staff have put together for Storyline.

Jesse, it may be more trouble than it's worth but I think you could do something like this to get the Next button to go through a series of layers before finally advancing to the next slide:

  1. Create a variable "X" and set the default value as 1.
  2. Create a trigger on the Next button to show Layer 1 if variable X = 1
  3. Create a trigger on the Next button that adds 1 to variable X each time it's clicked.
  4. Create another trigger on the Next button to show layer 2 if variable X = 2
  5. Create addition triggers on the Next button to show layer 3 if variable X = 3, etc., etc.
  6. Create a final trigger on the Next button to go to the next slide if variable X = (the number higher than your last layer).

It's an interesting question whether the file size would be larger/smaller or the same if you used multiple layers vs. multiple slides. My guess would be layers would be smaller in the SL file because you wouldn't need to duplicate whatever is on the base layer onto each additional slide. As for published size; I have no idea. Interesting though.

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