Forum Discussion
Progress bar in Articulate Storyline: Easy solution, using only one built-in variable
Hey everyone, I have created a video on how to create a progress bar in Storyline 360 - using only one built-in variable. I'm using the built-in variable Menu.Progress in the slide master.
Prior to recording this I only found solutions where you add triggers on the slides where you want your progress bar to fill up. You needed an extra variable to keep track of your progress and you would also have to put some kind of check in place, so that the progress bar doesn't fill up if you revisit a slide. If you create your progress bar this way, you have to make many adjustments when you add or delete slides in your project.
What I found is that you can use the built-in variable Menu.Progress to get rid of this hassle. I wanted to share this with you because I think it saves a lot of time in production and maintenance of your course.
Very simple technique for adding a progress bar to our SL project. Thanks for sharing this quick solution with us :)
If we have odd number of slides in our project (say 35), should we name the first state as "0.35%", second as "0.7%", third as "1.05" and so on? Please confirm.
Hi Bhanupriya, this really just depends on how fine tuned you want your progress bar to be. The number of states doesn't have to match the number of slides in your project. This approach really gives you much more flexibilty. Just think how fine tuned you want your progress bar for your project? 10 steps may be enough, or you could work with 20 or 25. Then the percentages are easier to work with, for 20 steps they would be: 0%, 5 %, 10% and so on.
Hi Georg,
I may be missing something on the progress meter. Please help here as it does not change and fill up accordingly. I am also having a challenge of making it appear through all the other content in the slide layout. I have attached my story file for you review.
Hi Phezulu, yes! When you look at the states of your progress bar rectangle in the slide master, you can see that the states for 10-100% all look the same. That's where you will have to change the look of the progress bar for the states, as described in the video from 03:18 and on.
Hi Georg, I just wanted to let you know that I found this post very useful.
Using the gradient percentage is a fantastic idea!
Many thanks 😁that's great. Thank you!
I got this to work in a single scene, but when I added scenes it went a bit haywire, with progress not showing or not progressing. It's single scene only I suppose?
Also I'd really like a progress bar on the menu at the beginning, showing progress per scene if this is possible, does anyone know? ThanksHey Diane! I'm not quite sure how to edit Georg's approach, so hopefully he can chime in to share how to make that work.
In the meantime, I wanted to share Allison's approach to making a progress meter. It includes a download if you want to take a deeper look. I tried copying and pasting one of her slides into a different scene and reworking the triggers to navigate to it and it seemed to accurately show the progress. I hope that helps!Hi Diane, sorry, when i posted before, it was with the wrong account, then when i tried to post with the right account, the post got reported. I hope that this third post will now show up. To your first questions: No it's not limited to one scene. It works with multiple scenes. I've attached a file where i split the slides into two scenes. Then i went to: View Tab → Slide Master: Then i clicked on the very first Slide of the slide master and in the trigger panel i changed the conditions of all triggers that are associated to the Progress bar. Because now i want to display the progress in the individual scene that the learner is currently viewing, i changed the conditions from "if "Menu.Progress"..." to "if "MenuSection.Progress" ...". Why did i use MenuSection.Progress and not Scene.Progress? With MenuSection.Progress only slides that are in the menu will be counted. This helps me, when i want to exclude a slide from the count. Then i just delete it from the menu. For example, when i use a menu slide in the beginning, that i don't want to have counted.
Your second question: displaying the progress for each scene individually is a bit tricky, because the built in progress variables work with the currently shown scene/MenuSection. I will try to think of a solution, but it will probably contain a lot more triggers and work, especially if slides are deleted or added later on.
Well i hope, at least i was able to help you with your first question. So please let me know, if my instructions and the attached file were helpful to you. Cheers, Georg
Thanks so much Georg for taking the time to do this. I'll come back to it when I'm a bit more experienced as I can't get that to work at the moment - could be my inexperience with slide masters! I'll bookmark this for future reference :)
This solution should work across multiple scenes.
You could use a separate slide master assigned to the menu, add your progress bar on that menu page slidemaster, add a custom variable at the end of each section in your SL file to indicate the section is complete then use those variables which then change the state when the timeline starts on this page for the menu. It will only affect the menu progress bar and not the progress bars across the rest of the module/scenes. At least in theory... will need testing.
(edited to add - I didn't see there was already a response to this - sorry! hope you got it resolved)
I have a question - I have a progress bar that I set for the project.progress but one part is a real-life exercise and in fact you don't click on all the slides which means that if you do well then you only get to 70% completion. The same is true for menu.progress as it works as a percentage. Is there any way around this?
Great question, Katie! I believe you can exclude certain slides by going to the Insert tab, clicking on Slide Number, then Exclude Slides. From there, you can de-select the slides you don't want to include in the count. Here's a screenshot for reference:
I hope that helps!
Thank you, I'll have a look :)
Hey Sarah! thanks for that it works exactly as I want.
I'm happy that helped! 🙂
I have followed the instructions, but I am not seeing the progress bar on my slides, I would want them to show on all the slides (I assume it should). Also, does the Menu have to be turned on? We don't generally turn on the menu as it tends to be problematic when we post it (we do not have a LMS at this time, we post on the web).
Hi Karen, if you’re willing to post your .story file, i could take a look. And no the menu doesn‘t have to be turned on.
