SL2 - Two questions concerning publish to Word: slide ordering & layer display
Mar 22, 2017
At my last job we rarely used the publish to Word feature in Storyline 2, but in my current role, I'm the only one with SL2 and my SMEs rely on it for giving me feedback. As such, we've ran into two minor issues that I'm hoping someone might be able to help me overcome.
The first has to do with slide ordering:
I know there's not an easy way to renumber slides so I've been using the drag-and-drop method, as best as I can, to ensure the slide order is correct when I publish to Word. Once the slides are properly numbered though, Storyline orders them left-to-right in my Story/Scenes view. (See attached screenshot)
It's obviously not critical, but I'd prefer to see them in a right-to-left order. Is there a preference setting I'm missing?
The second issue has to with the layer display:
The training file that I'm currently working on was built by my predecessor and she relied heavily on using single voice recordings and multiple layers to cover large swaths of content. She would manually screenshot each slide and manually build a Word doc for the SMEs to review - which results in 92 total "slides".
That method seems unnecessarily laborious, however, I know that when layers are turned on they are just displayed as if they are a single layer. (See attached screenshot).
So I'm curious if there's anyone has found an alternate publishing method where the layers are separated out into individual screenshots?
3 Replies
Hey Sean!
I tried setting up a new file similar to yours, and it looks like Story View is ordering the slides from left-to-right. I'm wondering if yours is in the opposite order because you manually moved the slides around in Story View. Is this how you would like your slides to be ordered?
Also, when you publish to Microsoft Word, each layer should be listed individually like it's own "slide", but you will see the objects on the base layer behind the objects on the slide layer unless you have selected "Hide objects on base layer" in the slide layer properties.
Aha! I seemingly forgot all about "Hide objects on base layer"!! Thanks for that tip, Alyssa!
As for the ordering, you perfectly identified the cause. All of the training I'm currently working on for my employer was created in SL1 by my predecessor over the past two years. I was tasked with updating the files to SL2 and then making major updates. This is the first file however that's really given me trouble when it came to the re-ordering of slides.
I know some of the difficulty spawns from how the triggers were initially built and I look forward to having the time to rebuild that logic so the files flow better. It just seems weird that while I can get the numbers in the correct "order", I can't for the life of me get the visual order straightened out. Since you correctly identified the reason as to why they're showing left-to-right, I'm guessing the only fix would be to create fresh slides in the correct order and then paste the content in?
Thanks for that update, Sean! And yes, if you're not able to click and drag the slides in Story View to the order you'd like, then you'll likely have to create new slides and copy/paste the content onto the new slides.
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