Hi, I would be grateful for any advice on how to export or convert an existing Articulate Storyline 360 project into a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation? We use Articulate often but on an upcoming occasion we need to be able to quickly export/convert our .story presentations to PPT; any solutions? Thank you so much! Respectfully, Andrew Farmer

Here's the thing - I need to create downloadable job aids to go with our elearning. I don't need animations or triggers for handouts. If I was able to export to PPT, I'd have at least a similar looking framework from which to create complimentary materials. Without the option to export to PPT I'm left with creating it from grainy screenshots, or converting to Word and then converting to PPT which again, leaves the visual quality lacking. I know our c-suite is looking for all our materials to have the same high quality, and I'd like to give it to them without having to recreate the wheel from scratch for every single project. I'm reading posts about this from 4+ years ago, and it makes me fret this isn't going to be a priority for some time to come. I just want to put in my 2 cents - I'm jammed for time and recreating already edited and lovely content is a bummer.

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. That works well and doesn't take long. Blog post and tutorial. 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.

Ok, that's not the best option. Is this something that Articulate is working on?

I have been searching for a solution to this as well, and today I tried this with some success. Publish from Storyline 360 to Word with Large screenshot size and ticked show layers and show slide notes. (I have my text/audio saved as notes to act as the transcript for accessibility feature) Once open in Word, I saved the file as a PDF. In Acrobat DC Pro, I opened the PDF and then exported the PDF as a PowerPoint file. This brings in each slide with a screenshot of the slide as well as the notes. It is a bit fiddly, but I find this much quicker than taking screenshots of each slide then adding in all my text. I hope this helps.

Just to add to the conversation, I think it is clear that a export to PPT is a feature that users need and want and I don't understand Articulates push back. I understand triggers, interactivity etc can't be used in PPT. However 99% of elearning projects developed (that need exporting to PPT) are simple text and images with the occasional layer. Why is it so difficult to export the content only to pptx? People do not expect the PPT to act like storyline. Just like exporting to video I would not expect interactivity. Saying this, I must say the export to video is a great feature. The workarounds from staff are not viable solutions for large corporate organisations, time to stop asking why and ask yourself how. I don't believe this one is too hard for your developers and would add real value to the product.

How to Export Storyline 360 project to PowerPoint?

TomKuhlmann
Staff
6 years ago
FYI, I moved the post up to this week. And here's a tutorial on how I use Screen2Gif to do this. Sorry for the rambling in the video, I just did it on the fly. :)

Post

Tutorial
KatieRiggio
Staff
6 years ago
Greetings, FMPE. Thanks for that context!

With your setup in mind, I've got a few ideas for us to explore:

If you need a course in multiple languages, Storyline 360's translation features can help with that. Click here to see our handy guide on translating content!

Publish a Course to Word: A great option to use for reviewing courses and making annotations. Keep in mind that this published output won't be editable so any edits will need to be made within the .story file in Storyline.

Publish Projects to Review 360: Stakeholders and subject matter experts can comment on the course in Review 360, and then the author can reference the feedback as they go back to make changes.

Let me know what you think! I'll also share your feedback with the team and let you know if we make changes in this area. 😊
JordanYap
Community Member
6 years ago
Am interested to have whatever we have placed in Storyline and be able to translate back to PowerPoint because there could be a need to re-use the storyline (that's been changed) back into PowerPoint so that it could be used in times where there's no internet connections.
SimoneJohns
Community Member
5 years ago
Hello, same issues here. Some of our new staff and volunteers have MAC computers so can't access course easily. As an interim measure i want to create a PP so they can at least view the material (it is mandatory child safeguarding training). This is not easy! Have tried publishing to Word but it hasn't came up well.
JuneDunlap
Community Member
5 years ago
This is something we are in dire need of as well. We have to create read and sign copies of all WBTs developed in SL360, in PowerPoint or even to Presenter 360. It would be so helpful having an export feature like that or an easier method than taking screen shots for every single page
MichaelBenne459
Community Member
5 years ago
In my past organization, with a reduced number of employees due to the pandemic, it became important for other teams who didn't have Articulate licenses to repurpose my created training content. When I used Presenter 360, I could hand over the PowerPoint slide decks with the exclusion of Engage interactions and QuizMaker slides. Also, the QuizMaker slides could be published to Word (I do wish there was an export from Engage to Powerpoint or to Word also).

But with Storyline and Rise, I lost that ability to share content easily with other teams. These other teams used PowerPoint so our team stopped using Storyline and Rise, in spite of their benefits.

Rise is appealing since it has the best size scaling for use in tablets and smartphones, better than Presenter and Storyline, but the inability to repurpose that Rise content by other non-Articulate teams means that we stopped using it.

Another problem with Rise is that it is stored in the Articulate cloud. I couldn't back up the files locally and if our Teams license expired, we couldn't get to our files at all. Please correct me if I am mistaken on these points.
VeronicaTomasel
Community Member
5 years ago
Hello!

Adding my experience here also. In my institution we like to offer a print out of our courses (similar to a handout). It would be great to have the option to transfer content from storyline to PPT.

We currently publish the content to word, clean it up, and then convert it to a PDF. However, there is a lot to clean up in the word version and it is harder to work on design in a word document than it is in a PPT.

I hope there is a way to do it soon!

thanks!

Vero
JuneDunlap
Community Member
4 years ago
Well said Glen! We get so many requests for just the slide content that it should be a feature! Having to take screenshots to paste into PowerPoint is crazy. You already have an import from PPT, why not create the reverse?

June
PeterWard-917e3
Community Member
3 years ago
I am currently in the painstaking process of rebuilding a Storyline file as a PowerPoint file. My client has had a request to present her course as a live instructor, and Storyline obviously won't work for that. Furthermore, since she'll need to update the content so that it works for a live audience, she needs it to be fully editable. Therefore all the workarounds suggested previously with screen shots are of no help. Please add an export to PowerPoint feature!
BrettConlon
Community Member
2 years ago
We already have our Storyline course built (we never started with a PPT file) and I'm now being asked to provide a PPT file to one of the other departments so they can work with it for their purposes.

So, I'm putting my hand up for the ability to publish to either PPT (preferred) or to PDF. Having a flattened image (when published to Word) is useless for our purposes. We're more than happy to lose the interactive bits and the branching, etc. All we want are editable pages (eg. change text and move images) for each slide.

If we could publish or print the course to PDF, we could then easily convert it to PPT from within Acrobat Pro.