Publishing to Word in Storyline 360 keeps crashing.

Hi Danielle,

Thanks for sharing the error. From looking at the StackTrace of the error, seems it's getting hung up on some characters within the document. Without view of the document I'm not sure what character(s) it could be. Nonetheless, if nothing jumps out as the possible problem, maybe you could try troubleshooting by uploading portions of the document. i.e. copy the 1st 1/2 of the document into a new one, save and try to upload. Do the same for the 2nd 1/2, etc. My best guess is this will help to narrow down the contents of the document the system is having issue with.

Hi Danielle,

I'm sorry to hear you're running into this error when publishing to Word! I'd like to enlist our support engineers to give you a hand in testing your file to find the cause of the issue. Can you share your .story file to your unique upload link here?

They'll reach out as soon as they're done testing. In the meantime, try repairing Storyline 360 to see if a reset helps with publishing your file!

Good morning, SL360 keeps crashing this week when trying to publish to a word doc. I have restored the default settings in the trust center for word, closed out of SL, rebooted my computer all multiple times and it still will not work. Anything else I can try? 

Hello Lisa,

I'm sorry to hear about the crashing! A quick question to start:

• Does Storyline crash when you try to publish any file or a particular one for Word?
  • Any File: A fresh installation of Storyline may help. Here's how to repair Storyline 360 ⤶
  • Particular One: What happens if you import the slides into a new Storyline file? Here are the steps ⤶

I am running the updated version of SL 360 and still facing the issue of crashing when exported to Word doc.

Any updates on solution?

Hi Anjali,

I'm sorry you're facing this snag as well!

We haven't heard from Lisa yet, but an extra line in the Player title was causing the crash in Danielle's scenario. Removing it resulted in a successful publish to Word.

Our Support team can help find a fix unique to you. If you could share an affected Storyline project using the private link below, we'll dig right in!

• Connect With Us

It was happening to multiple courses but not all of them - importing to a new story did not make a difference. I was on a time crunch for this course, so I ended up doing copy and paste to get an accessible document complete but I have not been able to solve the problem long term. I have not tried a fresh installation yet as that requires our IT dept for admin access. 

I realize this is almost a yr later, but I just experienced this issue for the first time myself, and I've been using SL since v1. After a lot of testing/troubleshooting/process of elimination, I suspect there is corruption affecting the PLAYER settings and then consequently, the Word pub function. (Weird cuz they're seemingly unrelated because the Player doesn't appear in the word published screen shots) A colleague and I (working remotely, geog very distant) were working on a Storyline file - passing it back and forth as needed... then tried to Word pub, and got the error.

After a lot of testing (and hair pulling), I stumbled upon a fix when I tried creating a new SL file and pasting the original slides..didn't change anything in the player, left all the settings as their defaults, including the default player. Saved the file, then tried publishing a Word doc --it published perfectly. So it worked when I created a new file. 

Then... I went back into the original file in which I'd first experienced the issue - but this time, I changed the PLAYER / CHANGE PLAYER settings to the Storyline default, clicked OK to close out of the player window, then tried republishing the course as a Word doc, and voila! The doc published perfectly. (Note --I didn't change the file save as location for the doc...more on that later). I asked my colleague to try this tweak on her end, and it worked,  AS LONG AS SHE DOESN"T CHANGE THE DEFAULT 'SAVE TO' location.  I realized I, too, hadn't changed that location in my test (and I dont plan to ;p)

NO CLUE WHY the default player tweak worked, but doing so is what finally got our word pub function working for us in our SL file. Hope someone figures this out!!!

(Btw - In my investigation, I asked my colleague which build of SL she was using, and it turns out she was using a slightly older version. She has since updated her software so we now have the same build version. She said now, the publish to word works fine, AS LONG AS SHE DOESN"T CHANGE THE DEFAULT 'SAVE TO' location. UGH! I've done enough troubleshooting for one day. :p Hope this rant helps someone!)

Hi Kathy, and welcome to E-Learning Heroes. 😊

I appreciate you chiming in and sharing your experience and troubleshooting. It certainly could be helpful to someone that stumbles across this conversation in the future.

When you mention changing the 'default save to' location, I'm curious if you were saving to a network or shared drive when experiencing the error. We recommend working on your local C: Drive:

Storyline: Create, Edit, and Publish Courses on Your Local Hard Drive

Another option sounds like it could be a corrupted player, which could have been caused by working on a network drive.

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for the response. I was working 100% locally - the file was on my computer, not network. And whenever I changed the 'save to' location - it was always a local folder vs. the default windows myStoryline folder that Storyline puts in there. Weirdness!