How to Export Storyline 360 project to PowerPoint?

Storyline has a PowerPoint import feature. PowerPoint does not have a Storyline import feature. They are two different tools with different features that don't translate.

If you know you need a PowerPoint version of what you build in Storyline, I'd start with PPT and then import that into Storyline to build the interactive elements.

I pulled all of the different tips together in this blog post. 

https://blogs.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/convert-storyline-courses-powerpoint/

Hi all,

Exporting to Powerpoint is something our clients (large organizations) really need, too. They are changing some of their training due to the pandemic.

Some sales people need the PPTs to 'speak to them' live in groups, and also to review while traveling. Word just doesn't work for this, for several reasons. Some executives are not in the office much and need something offline.

Tom's video was helpful for images, but higher resolution slide images/screenshots would be welcomed, and it's imperative that all the notes are included for each slide.

Thanks for considering to add this needed functionality to Storyline 360!

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. 

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.

Hi Kathryn and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

I appreciate you chiming in to share your thoughts and use case. I've added it to our report as we continue to track user requests/needs.

Just want to say I LOVE Storyline and our community :) I'm also adding my voice here, as I've hired a remote copy editor to revise the copy in my courses, but he'd needs the text to be selectable/editable in the version I send to make his changes, or he'd have to re-type everything. He has a Mac. A PPT file would be perfect so he could have all the slide elements in context along with editable text boxes.

If Storyline can already export each slide image (including layers) as a Word document, would it be possible to simply add a way for certain aspects of each slide to be exported as editable content?

Hi Claude!

We don't currently offer a way to open Storyline 360 courses in PowerPoint. Storyline projects are saved as .story files which is an unsupported file type in PowerPoint. 

We'll let our community members chime in to share workarounds!

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.

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

Hello Simone and welcome to E-Learning Heroes :)

Thanks for contacting us to share that you are experiencing a similar issue.

You mention that it's mandatory training. Do you have an LMS for tracking this content or how are you publishing and sharing the content?

Viewing published content on a Mac is supported in these environments:

• Safari (latest version)
• Google Chrome (latest version)
• Firefox (latest version)