Outlines Appear on Some Objects When Importing from PowerPoint to Storyline

Jan 17, 2019

We've noticed that when importing slides from PowerPoint to Storyline 3.5, a dashed outline border appears on some of the textboxes. 

Some testing shows that this occurs in either .PPT or .PPTX formats. Common occurance is when a textbox is added to the stage with a Blank layout applied, or when adding text to a blank shape (no fill, no outline) but with text applied.

When in Storyline, the object has an outline in the working file, but does not appear in the published version. The concern is that the outline DOES appear when printing the content to Word (via images).

Is there way this can be prevented? .pptx, .story, and .doc file attached.

8 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Nick,

Thanks for those files and description! I see the same behavior while testing in Storyline 3 Update 5 and Storyline 360, build 3.23.17480.0. What I did notice, is it's only on the rectangles you've added with no shape/fill, and it's not occurring on standard text boxes. 

I'll share this example with my team as a possible software bug, and keep you posted here with any updates.

Thanks for bringing this one to our attention! 

Nick S

That is a pretty good workaround, actually. We've been setting the outline colour to be the same as the background colour, but then we get an issue where when the object is animated in, it looks less than desirable.

To give some context on why this is an issue for us: when we import 50+ slides of instructor content, it can be quite onerous to convert all of these orphan boxes (usually because the slides were not created using a template, or ad-hoc).

Thanks for bringing this forward to your team. 

Ren Gomez
Hi Stephanie,
 
Thanks for checking in. I'm sorry that you're running into a bug where you see outlines on your text boxes. As Ashley mentioned, this occurs when you import a shape with no lines/fills from PowerPoint.
 
It is currently in the early stages of review based on our How We Tackle Bugs article. To help you plan, it's unlikely to be fixed in the next couple of updates, but we'll be sure to jump back in here with any updates.

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