Timeline Show / Hide question on grouped objects

Dec 19, 2013

This is a usability post.  Maybe I have it wrong, but the show / hide implementation for grouped objects seems awkward.

WITH THE OBJECT SHOWING, click hide, all elements in the group are hidden.  [fine]

Now click HIDE ALL.  All objects are hidden.  Click the group SHOW and the objects inside the group remain hidden? Nothing is revealed on-screen.

Now you could jump in and say: if one or more objects in the group are SHOW, while others are HIDE, toggling the GROUP will show and hide only the objects with the SHOW attribute.  This may be optimal WHEN SOME OBJECTS WITHIN THE GROUP have the show attribute.  I don't recall ever having to do this but I can see it's value.  The way I use Storyline I would classify this usage as infrequent relative to what follows.

How I use SHOW / HIDE most often is: hide all objects, then show a group.  In this instance, when NONE of the objects have the show attribute, turning on the group SHOW does nothing.  It is necessary to click SHOW on each individual object in the group.

This behavior seems counter-intuitive.

Sam

6 Replies
Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

Hi Sam,

I've also been perplexed by this behavior, thinking that Showing a group meant show all of its objects...only to find when previewing that I was wrong, and the objects in the group were still hidden.

I posted about it somewhere, because I wasn't sure if it was something I was doing wrong.

So, when showing a group, I'd like all the objects to be shown; as it is now, as you've said, I need to click on each one to show it.

Should we be making a feature request?

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.