Forum Discussion
How to Export Storyline 360 project to PowerPoint?
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
65 Replies
I will also recognize the age of this thread and still feel that this is a need in June 2026. I inherited 15 training courses, made up of 66 lessons, each its own PowerPoint presentation that had been turned into on-line learning during the pandemic using another LMS. So when I came into the picture and moved to Storyline, I had about 1,200 slides in those 66 lessons, all in PowerPoint. Storyline did a great job of allowing me to import the PowerPoint files. I was able to use the new AI function to do text-to-speech so I could convert the speaker notes into voice. (Hence, I assume many think, well, if it can import PowerPoint, why can't it export?) For reviews, the Review software is good, if the goal is to replicate the user experience. I am not the SME, so now I need SMEs to review both the text on the slides and the speaker notes in detail. The Review software can only show the slide and captions for the voiceover, thus, any SME review isn't going to be able to easily offer technical edits for the script. To get the material to the SMEs, it is currently easy to give them the PowerPoints and have them edit slides and speaker notes. But if the edits are extensive...I'm back to re-creating the entire lesson in Storyline again by importing edited slides and using TTS. If the SMEs want to suggest something more extensive, like adding or removing whole concepts, they aren't going to be licensed Storyline users and there is no easy way to hand them the content. Thus, what I think Articulate is missing is the ubiquity of PowerPoint and the volume of work required to move more fluidly between PowerPoint and Storyline (screen captures per slide in a program of 1,200 slides isn't logical). Another missing point is that I'm not starting from scratch here and I have a ton of material I found it worthwhile to take the time to import into Storyline, which I think Articulate has done an excellent job in making that possible, including the use of slide masters. I had very little difficulty importing pretty static slides and only a modicum of challenge with tables. A number of on-line videos that are now dated suggested that these functions have been greatly improved over time. I'd think the investment to go the other way would be worth it and would still up-vote it. Many thanks.
Did you find a way to keep the text fully editable without manual correction in PPT? Also, how does it handle complex layouts with multiple text boxes?
I realize this is from FOREVER ago, but I also wanted to add to the use case examples for this. Our courses are legal and compliance related. We get frequent questions like "where in the training is X covered? Can we see just that portion?" And providing them a link to the entire course on review360 is impractical for them to have to go through the whole thing. I have sometimes used the export for translation function, but it is pretty overwhelming and includes a lot of unnecessary information. Also taking a screenshot of the course each time someone asks a question is impractical.
We would like to be able to house some version of the course to provide when questions about content occur without having to go through the entire course.
We have similar requests often, especially with safety related content. We either publish just the slides that have relevant content (as suggested below) or we unlock navigation and point our safety team to the section they need.
Hi KimBettendorf​!
Thank you for the feedback!
Exporting content from Storyline directly into PowerPoint is not currently supported, but I've included your voice in a feature request that we're tracking.
In the meantime, Storyline does allow authors to publish a single Scene, or Slide from a project. This allows you to share only a portion of a Storyline course with your stakeholders.
Have a great start to your week!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
Yeah, wow, that's weird. It's showing the PDF font as T1 - is that what you've used in the Storyline file? The resulting font in the PPT file is Times New Roman. There's some parts of ther PPT file that are usable, but for the most part... it's a mess!
Perhaps try replacing the font with something more "generic" in the Storyline file, just for the export process, then change it back when it's in PPT?
Are you using current versions of Storyline/Acrobat?
OK, for those interested, the closest workaround I have found is to do the following (sorry it's long but I have had to write these instructions for my colleague). It's a bit labour-intensive (outputting one slide at a time) but you'll get as close to a working PPT file (with separate, editable elements) as you can get. You'll need Acrobat Pro for this workaround:
- Publish your course to Web format
- Export individual pages from your course
- Open the course in your favourite web browser
- Go to the desired slide
- Set the slide up how you'd like it to be seen (ie. animations completed, tick/reveal/complete as wanted)
- Print the PAGE to PDF with the following settings (note: the settings will remain the same when printing the next slide)
- Destination: PDF
- Orientation: Landscape
- Paper size: anything larger than your course (as shown in Acrobat's preview) - we'll crop it later.
- Margins: None (puts the course flush to top of the page)
- Scale: Default (or adjust as needed)
- Background graphics: ticked (to show the bounds of your course)
- Save: Name it with the appropriate page/slide number
- Repeat steps 3 to 5 for every slide you want to output
- Build a PDF of the complete course
- Open Acrobat Pro and Choose File > Create > Combine Files into a Single PDF
- Drag all of your PDF files onto the window - they should be in correct order
- Press the Combine button (this builds a multi-page PDF)
- Crop the course
- Select the Crop tool (in the "Edit PDF" tools panel)
- Drag the marquee to the bottom-left and bottom-right corners (you can use the Control-space and Control-Alt-Space keys to zoom in/out on the corners while doing this)
- Press the Enter key to invoke the Set Page Boxes window
- Set "Page Range" to All so all pages are cropped
- Save the PDF (just for good measure)
- Convert the PDF to PowerPoint
- Select File > Export to > Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation
- Name & Save it
- Open the resulting file in PowerPoint
NOTES (my quick observations - don't hold me to them):
- Some elements may not convert properly (eg. gradients, vectors with transparency).
- Text and items outside of the view of a Scrolling Panel are lost.
- Some graphics may be grouped together and can easily be ungrouped.
- It seems to build Slide Masters (not perfectly accurate but a good start).
- Images seem to retain their original size (ie. they're NOT re-sampled and therefore don't lose quality)
- Hyperlinks get lost (although a mailto: link still worked in the exported PDF but didn't work in the final PPT file). You'll have to add them back to the editable text in PPT.
That's all I have come across so far. I hope this helps someone from having to completely rebuild complex pages, until Articulate adds the Publish to PPT option in the future (putting it out there...)
I have followed your instructions and my results were....interesting. I'm attaching the pdf and the pptx.
This is great! Thank you for documenting the process so carefully. I was not aware Acrobat had an export to PPT option.
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.
Something that I would appreciate is if we'd be able to have the slides exported as a PDF vs word so there was a higher resolution images to copy and paste into PowerPoint. I understand that we're not able to directly import, but for me I prefer to build in Storyline (I find it a much better design tool vs PPT). Obviously we would lose any interactivity, but I'd still prefer to be able to copy and paste the slide for example into PPT (even as an image!). Other than screenshots, do y'all have any other recommendations here?
If you want screen grabs of your course, I've found one of the easiest things to do is set your course at the resolution you want. Then use Screentogif (free) to record going through your course.
I detail how to do that in this blog post.
Tom, thank you so much for this video and for this method. We often get requests from lawyers and other regulating agencies wanting paper copies of courses. I will definitely use this method that you've outlined so well here in the future when I get a request like this. It will make things so much faster.
