Invalid or corrupt project - HELP!

Hi Phil,

Thank you. 

That seems like a valid argument too.

Adrian

Karen, are you viewing the slide at 100%?  Anything lower or higher(?) can make a big difference to 1) accuracy of cursor placement and 2) seeing the true formatting/layout of the slide.  I've experienced a few editing issues myself that really do warp what you're working with.  

I'm not saying the above will resolve your issue - I'm merely stating that working at 100% is the most accurate marker for editing anything.

I am receiving the "This project is invalid or corrupt and cannot be opened. It may have been created in an earlier version of Storyline." message a lot. It iscontent created by the SME that I combine to create a complete course. We verified our software versions are the same, right down to the last digit. It doesn't happen with every file, but it is turning up about 20% of the time.

Any other suggestions?

Add this to the can't "Import Storyline project into another" issue and productivity is rapidly decreasing.

Hi Brenda, 

Sorry to hear about the frustration. The error message you received is something we've seen in the past when working from a network or USB drive. Could that be a possibility in your instance? 

Please make sure that you are working on your local drive (your C: drive). Working on a network drive or a USB drive can cause erratic behavior, including file corruption, loss of audio, and other unexpected behavior. 

Additionally, here are some tips for managing your files which can help prevent issues: 

1. You should also make sure the directory path to your project files and your published output is less than 260 characters (for example C:\Articulate).

2. Avoid using special characters, accents or symbols in your file names. 

Additional information regarding "Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces" in Windows operating systems can be found in the following Microsoft article: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247(VS.85).aspx

hello peter,

we use microsoft sharepoint for file sharing so that could be contributing to the problem. i am trying an ftp site to see if that resolves the issue.

thank you,

brenda

I've had this issue a lot as well and so have started backing up my working files.

For me it seems to occur when sharing files over our company's network. I'll place a file in a network folder location and a colleague will download it - but will be unable to work on it due to this error message. We all have the latest update, the file naming conventions are in line with our corporate standard (meant to be more stringent than the 260 character limit, no special characters etc.) and we generally don't do anything too wild with the files themselves. Our network is stable and seems to work well when sharing anything else.

Recently, while trying to open up one of these corrupted monstrosities sent to me by a coworker, I had the bright idea to try to import the slides into a new file. The attached error message resulted. I hope this helps with diagnosing the problem, Articulate folks!

Hi Glen,

Thanks for sharing the additional information here. In regards to working on the files, are the users downloading them to a local drive and then opening them or are they opening them directly from the network drive? If it's the latter - that could be the root cause of the problem and associated corruption. You'll find more information about that here. Unfortunately, if the file is already corrupted the "import" into a new project may not fix all the associated issues.

If you continue to experience difficulty with a particular project or all your projects, it may also be worth checking to see that there isn't some additional back up/versioning happening to the network drive or a shared folder and to see if you could conduct the repair of Storyline. Also, we're always happy to take a look at a particular file. You can share it here in the forums by using the paper clip icon or connect directly with our support team.

I received this same error when I tried to load a Storyline 1.6 project into Storyline 2.0. I only received the error ...

This project is invalid or corrupt and cannot be opened. It may have been created in an earlier version of Storyline.

... when I tried to load the file into 2.0. When I load it into Storyline 1.6 it works fine. As it turned out, I had to remove the developer notes that were on the side of the staging area, like this one shown:

Once I removed those from all the slides, I could load the Storyline 1.6 file into 2.0 with no problems.

Thanks Nathan for sharing that update here - I hadn't seen that behavior yet, but I'll definitely keep an eye out for it. 

Had the same problem today. No clear reason for the issue. Single project on local drive, no system crash - none of the common scenarious described.

Thanks to the messages here was able to recover a previous version (using windows 7) and only lost about a couple of days :-(