slide master

Hi Lynda,

• If Storyline is behaving oddly and it's a recent development, I'd check into the following things first:Work on your local drive (your C: drive).Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, includingfile corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 
• You should also make sure the directory pathto your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters(for example C:\Articulate).
• Avoid using special characters, accents orsymbols in your file names.
• Are you using update 4 of Storyline? 

You may want to try importing it into a new file, or it's happening across multiple files you could also conduct the repair of Storyline. 

Thanks, Ashley.  I had tried all of those.  I put in a helpdesk request and the problem is solved!  I did not know (or think about) that the items (graphics, text, etc.) in the timeline could be unlocked!  I needed to unlock the items and copy and paste them into the slide master.  Works great!

Thanks for your tips  I didn't know about the directory path needing to be a maximum of 250 characters.

Thanks Lynda for the update and glad that they were able to assist you.

Also, looks like a typo on my part, it's 260 not 250.  You can see documentation on that here.