Storyboarding directly in Storyline?

Hi everyone,

I've seen the multitudes of storyboard templates done as tables in Word. I hate them. I know when my clients review them, they are overwhelmed by trying to interpret how something in a word table would actually look on a screen. When I was on the receiving end of these, my eyes would blur and I would rather stick sharp objects in my eyes than review an elearning storyboard from a vendor. While they work well to confirm content, most clients have a terrible time making the mental leap from the storyboard to the actual module.

We currently create a "High Level Outline" document in Word which is like a light version of a storyboard. It captures the screen title, the key learning points for the screen, and initial ideas for graphics or interactivity. It's written for the client, not for the ISD or developer.

From there, we were creating our "storyboard" in Powerpoint with the script in a Word doc. I actually think it was less of a storyboard and more of a first prototype. When we used Articulate Studio, PPT made great sense, because it let the client really see what the screens would look like. We used placeholder graphics, put little text box notes on the screen to describe intended interactions, and mock up quiz slides, but otherwise it was pretty close to what they would see in the final version. PPT was also an easy tool for us to work with internally. I could route a PPT to a graphic artist so she could mock up and insert a custom graphic, and send it to our copy editor to check for errors. Our clients could easily review PPT, and add comments. 

"Draft 1" in PPT would be maybe 50% done, Draft 2 would be 80% done, and then once script was recorded we would bump it to Presenter/Engage/Quizmaker and put the final touches on it. 

But now with Storyline, I'm not sure it's such a great idea to storyboard in PPT. For one thing, the import from PPT can be a little wacky in terms of text spacing. I'm wondering if we should just storyboard right in Storyline. This would mean that our clients would have to review the published output, which I think is a little harder in terms of collecting feedback. We're going to explore using a google doc web object to collect feedback from reviewers.

Is anyone else doing this? Using storyline to do rapid prototypes instead of using complex Word doc templates? Or, successfully storyboarding in PPT and moving to Storyline?