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.
61 Replies
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.
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 spent hours trying to figure this out from a class I took a while ago (the old way, I'm guessing). Your way was so fast, simple, and it worked. Thank you so much.
Hi Paul, thank you for your feedback. Yes! :-) For people who know the old way (like you and me) this really feels super fast :)
Hi Georg, this works perfectly with a single scene, but how do I get it work on the different scenes in my module? I generally have at least 4 scenes in each of my modules.
I've modified my module to use the "Project.progress" variable, and it works until I get to the 95% mark or the last 4 slides, then just won't work. Please help as I don't know how to fix this.I finished walking through your tutorial just now, Georg. It worked perfectly. Thanks so much!
Hey James, you're welcome! Thanks for letting me know this works for you.
Hi Georg, Thank you so much! I was able to create a progress bar quickly with your tutorial. Much appreciated!
Hi Robin, thank you for your awesome feedback!
Hi Georg,
Thanks for sharing this tutorial with the community! That trick you used to create accurate progress bar lengths with a gradient is something I'm definitely going to try in the future.
Hi Bianca, thanks for the feedback. I thought it was important to explain this in detail because it plays a big part in setting up the progress bar in a way that is maintainable later on. So thank you for acknowledging :-)
Great video. Just wondering if there is a way to get the progress bar to start counting from slide 2 instead of 1, so the home/introduction page isn't counted.
Hey Wendy, i can think of to ways to achieve this:
- Using the variable Scene.Progress instead of Menu.Progress. Put the Home/intro page into one scene and all the other slides into a second scene. On the first slide the progess bar will be at 100%, but you can hide it, just by putting an object in front of the bar. On all the other slides the progress will be shown, just the way you described.
- Very similar: Using MenuSection.Progress instead of Menu.Progress. Put the Home/intro page into one scene, with no other slides in it. Go to Player → Menu. Here you will need two headings: The heading of the first scene and the heading of the second scene. All the other headings can be deleted (KEEP the item's children). Now you demote all the slides so that they are all lined up under the second heading. The Progress bar will now function the same way as described above. You just get to keep your scenes in storyline.
Hi Georg, really nice feature and easy to set up thanks to your video.
Perfect solutions for my project
Thanks for the great feedback! I’m happy this is working for you.
