Setting focus to text entry box in Storyline

Hi there David and welcome to the community!

Thanks for stopping by and sharing that information - I'm glad to hear that Tomer's information helped. Thanks, also, for sharing the steps you've taken to get this working in your project.

Have a great day!

I came across this issue today and was glad to find this thread; thank you everyone above for clarifying that the self-focusing only works for manual fields, and not as part of a quiz. I was pulling my hair out.

Because I needed the self-focusing text entry to be part of a quiz, I used this workaround:

• Use a 'pick one' question instead
• Put two random buttons off the edge of the screen: Correct and Wrong
• Set the 'pick one' up so that Correct button is the correct answer
• Add a text field
• Add a trigger so that the 'correct' button is selected when the text field is equal to whatever the right answer is (eg, when user presses enter)
• Add a trigger so that the 'wrong' button is selected when text field is NOT equal to the correct answer (when user presses enter)
• This will give you the ability to have the text entry field be both graded AND self-focusing (assuming you followed the advice in this thread and moved your text entry field to the bottom of your timeline).

Thanks so much for sharing, Andy! That is a brilliant workaround. I've seen the technique of the 'pick one' with buttons off screen demoed before, but I never would have thought to use it in this way. I hadn't checked in on this thread for a while, but seeing that much more has been added over the last year, I'm loving the ideas.

David, the idea to add a trigger to the button to go to next slide so the student could just tab through the form and complete the fields as they would in a live system is a great idea, too! I'm definitely thinking of ways I could use that.

I struggled a couple of days with this. To save you some time, here is what I've found. If your text entry box is already on the bottom, move in up and then back down. For whatever reason, it seems to work after moving it. My customers also wanted the text box to be blank each time the user tried the activity. If you need this, attached is a screen shot of my triggers. 

Welp, there's already been some solutions posted, but I thought I'd add my two cents (is it two pennies if you're in the UK?).

I tried all the solutions and while they were partially effective, infuriatingly they'd only work on a couple of questions out of my humble quiz (I'd created a Question Bank of 20-odd Fill in the Blank questions).

I discovered that if moving the text input to the bottom of the timeline doesn't work for you, Right-Click->Send to Back->Send to Back seems to do the trick. Hopefully it'll work for you too!

Hi, All-

I know this is an old thread, but I found it now that I need help with this issue.

After much frustration trying all of the above without success, my one last attempt at a solution worked. HOWEVER, the problem for me appears to be Storyline 1 vs. Storyline 2. All of my frustration was in SL2. When I attempted the manual steps stated by Tessa Maki (in SL1), it worked beautifully!

1. Create a layout on the slide master that includes the background image you want.

2. Insert the new layout on your desired slide.

3. Insert text entry box;format so it blends with background.

4. If you have any other objects on the slide, make sure the text entry box is at the bottom of the list in the timeline or it won't be the focus when timeline starts.

5. Preview - the text entry box should default to a cursor.

All of my current projects are SL2 and I don'twant to recreate in SL1 if it's not necessary.

Has anyone else found this? Is this a bug in SL2?

I'll appreciate any help!

Thanks!

Hi Bob,

Yes, this has been reported to our QA team for review in Storyline 2, as I mentioned in this other thread.

I'll add this thread to the existing QA report as well so that they're aware of how many users are being impacted and so that when there is additional information to share I can update you here.

Thanks, Ashley! I didn't see the other thread.

No worries Bob - it wasn't always super easy to find threads in ELH...although that should be changed now that we've launched ELH2! :-) 

Hi Ashley, 

Are Storyline 1 updates still being made? This design flaw, which was revealed over three years ago in various threads, makes Storyline incredibly cumbersome for interactive simulations of software requiring data entry.