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?

DebGyde
Community Member
10 months ago
Hi Ben & Brett,

Thanks for looking through this thread. I'm glad you could at least get the PDF extract. I'm on Office 365 so can no longer export Storyline to Word as it's trying to save as a .doc instead of .docx file which is no longer supported. (which is a different conversation thread with Articulate). So this work around doesn't work for me any longer. I'm no exporting everything as a translation file and then having to clean up the exported document in order to get something remotely useable for course reviews. Having a better export function would be a game changer for us - and seems to be something Articulate needs to invest in if it wants to stay in the authoring game, as there are other tools out that provide this.
- Will_Findlay
  Community Member
  10 months ago
  You said:
  
  I'm on Office 365 so can no longer export Storyline to Word as it's trying to save as a .doc instead of .docx file which is no longer supported.
  
  Is this because of a recent update to Word? I am on Office 365 and it can open .doc files and save as .doc files. My first step is to open the Storyline produced .doc file in Word and save it to .docx.
  - DebGyde
    Community Member
    10 months ago
    Hi Will,
    
    we are running Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Windows 11 and it's happening for all of our team. this thread below shows it's happening for others as well. It could be organisation wide settings, as we have similar issues with opening old PPT rather than .pptx files. .doc file types are legacy files and require conversion, however I get an error in Articulate if I try and download in that format.
    
    https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/cannot-export-storyline-to-word
PaulBroekhof-42
Community Member
3 months ago
My use case for wanting to have the option to export to PPT is that we want to use the same materials both for eLearning purposes and for classroom delivery. Until now, we have had to produce, maintain and synchronize the two formats manually, which is a nightmare. Having a single source of truth (Articulate Storyline) from which to export the current version of a training course into PPT would be brilliant!
WaltHamilton
Super Hero
3 months ago
I find classroom delivery with PPt so constraining, especially its rudimentary navigation ability. (I guess if you are presenting a linear, read a book type of presentation, it is useable. In that case, I prefer to just copy the book and project the images.) But for anything else, I project my screen from SL (it is, after all, just a webpage), and talk to the audience. I can just lecture and make all the choices, or allow audience input as much as I prefer. If you have the ability to project a PPt, you can equally as well project published SL.

If you have clients or SMEs that want to change the content, they will need to have SL to republish it. If they aren’t interested in that, perhaps they need to be sold on the benefits of using PPt exclusively, without the added cost of SL. It does have some small navigational ability.

If you are willing to present with PPt’s scaled back capabilities, another option might be to also use PPt for online presentations, too.

On the other hand, if your live presenter wants to use audience input as part of the presentation, that can be done while projecting the SL project.

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How to Export Storyline 360 project to PowerPoint?

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