Keep in mind that Storyline and PowerPoint are two different applications with different programming and file names. They may look similar, but they don't work the same way or have the same features.
When Storyline imports PowerPoint, it's looking inside the PowerPoint file, seeing what's there and rebuilding the content in Storyline. It's creating Storyline slides based on what PowerPoint says is in the PowerPoint slides. Not much different than you opening a blank slide and then building a Storyline slide based on what you see in PowerPoint.
That's my non-technical explanation. :)
In reverse, PowerPoint doesn't have a feature to open a Storyline file and rebuild the Storyline content as PowerPoint slides. And Storyline is not going to output to PowerPoint because of the interactive features such as layers, variables, the various triggers, drag and drops, etc. PowerPoint wouldn't know what to do with those things.
With that said, I looked over the questions in the thread and here are some workarounds/ideas for those who want their Storyline content in PowerPoint. Most of these do not take much time and are fairly simple to do.
- Start your course design with PowerPoint.
- If you are always running PowerPoint content and Storyline content in tandem. I'd build all of your core content in PowerPoint. When it's complete, you import to Storyline and then add your interactive elements. If you need to make modifications to a few slides, modify the PowerPoint, import into Storyline, and delete the old one. That works if you're not changing a lot of content. So PowerPoint is always the core content that is signed off on before you start working in Storyline.
- Use the screen capture method I described above.
- Publish Storyline to Word to have a Presentation File
- This is super easy and only takes a few minutes. The output is a PowerPoint file with all of your Storyline content and you can make it interactive (as much as PPT can handle)
- Publish as Word. This publishes to an older version so people can open it.
- Open the Word, save as .docx to convert it.
- Unzip the Word docx to expose the images.
- Import the images into PowerPoint and you're done.
- Tutorial with tips on editing and adding interactions
- Publish to Word to make edits.
- This works when you have a reviewer who doesn't have Storyline but needs to edit the text in the slides.
- Follow the publish to Word instructions above. Work from either the Word doc or do the PPT import to see the images better.
- Export a translation version.
- Make text edits in the translation.
- Reimport into Storyline. All of your edits are in Storyline.
- Tutorial to show how that works.
- Only One Storyline author
- Have the people build whatever they want in PowerPoint and then you import those slides into Storyline, apply your theme settings/layouts.
- If that's something you do quite a bit, I'd create a master slide that has the layouts and whatnot to map to what you do in Storyline.