Slide master layers

Hi all,

Reviving this one again, I'm in the same boat as Sharon here - as it appears many others are judging by the numerous different threads. 

I would like to think that the whole point of having a Slide Master with layer/trigger functionality is that it would work when applied to a slide within your content.

I'm making a feature recommendation to add this functionality or remove it from the slide master entirely. 

I've found the solution at the moment is to create a story template file, but again it is a long winded and painful process that has an end result of many unnecessary duplications of slidemater themes, resulting in unnecessarily large file sizes.

Hi, I'm also running into the same problem. Seems like there's no solution to it... I'm currently creating a template for our company's new modules and I visualized something very interactive yet easily editable. 

In the end it's not possible using slide master... it's a shame. 

I will revive this old thread because I am running into a similar situation and I can't find a resolution.

I want to create a slide layout that has layers on it, and that I can apply to new slides.  When I create the layout with a layer it looks great.  When I create a new slide and apply the layout only the base layer shows and the additional layers are not added to the new slide.

In the attached file I show the desired affect:  

• A picture is on the base layer, filling the slide.  This is an image placeholder that can be changed.
• A box with gradient is over the picture on one side, with a text placeholder over opaque part of the gradient.  The gradient fades the image into a white background so that the text can be easily read.

I tried doing this all on a one layer layout, but the large image placeholder won't stay behind the box with gradient.  When I do this on two layers it looks great in theory but the layer with the gradient and text box doesn't get applied to a new slide using the layout.  

Why provide the ability to create layers in the layouts if they don't transfer to new slides?  How can this be fixed? Can this be done using layouts instead of by creating the slides and then duplicating them?

This sounds like a good solution, except I'm creating16 units with about 100 slides each (SME-driven decision), so that's 1600 copies. Then to further complicate matters, I'm importing about 100 PowerPoint slides per unit (1600 slides) which I then have to cut/paste into the blank slides with working layers/triggers (including everything necessary to support closed captioning per Steve Flowers's example).  So we're talking 3200 cut/copy/paste operations before I can really start working on my content.

So, yes, I really need this as part of my template master.

subscribing to this. I would have thought this really is core functionality. I mean, why else can a master slide have layers at all?

Adding my voice to those requesting the capability. In my case I need to be able to quickly update style and branding decisions project-wide while still personalizing content on each slide. If there's another way, I would love to hear about it. Slide masters seem like the obvious choice but only if layers and triggers can come along for the ride.

Well I'm just adding to this because I have just tried to do the same thing. I have a custom menu that I added to the master slide on its own layer , created a trigger in the master for that layer to show when the timeline starts and when I create a new slide based on this master, nothing shows? The layer(s) you create in the master, are not even listed as a selectable item when you try and create a trigger in regular slide view. Have any new solutions or workarounds come up?

It's been two years since the last post on this thread, so here I go. I am trying to streamline the creation of our content. I have Slide Masters formatted and prepared for each slide type we need in Storyline. However, I still have to manually add three slide layers to each slide type in the project. This slows down the process significantly if anyone other than me is creating content.

Has anyone figured out a way to add functional slide layers to a slide master, so they are available when you select that slide layout? Keeping my fingers crossed that in 9 years, someone has figured out some workaround.

Thanks,

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for reaching out! 

While you do have the option to add working layers to a Slide Master layout, these layers will still not be visible when you apply the layout to your slides. Have you considered using Slide Templates so you can reuse content that you've created and just modify them as needed? 

I’ll be happy to pass your thoughts on to our product team, but you can also feel free to detail them more through an additional feature request! Here's how we manage feature requests for your reference. 

Thank you for passing on the request! I looked into slide templates, but that option was not as intuitive for our use cases. I did create a blank story file from which others can import slides from that presentation into their projects. It sounds like an identical process to creating slide templates, but I will look into the differences.

It would be more intuitive for the less savvy Storyline users to have the option when they add a blank slide to just change the layout from within their story and have some core logic carry over like layers.

Our example case for this feature is a captions layer for each slide. This layer also interacts with a global variable that affects every slide when that slide's timeline begins. Again, it's not the end of the world; it just can come across as tedious copy and integrate that layer to every new slide for someone less familiar with Storyline. 

As always, thank you very much for the suggestion and for passing along the idea.