Forum Discussion
Storyline 360 Pros — What’s Your Favorite “Hidden Gem”? 💎
As someone who’s spent a lot of time working with (and on!) Storyline 360, I’ve come to appreciate the power in the little things — those lesser-known features that quietly make our lives easier.
Here's one of my personal favorites:
🎧📽️ Cue Points with the “C” Key:
I recently spoke with a customer who struggled to time trigger actions to audio and video media on their slides. They would preview the slide, make note of when a trigger should be fired, then return to slide authoring view to add a cue point to the timeline to tie into the trigger event. This would require a lot of manual back-and-forth between authoring and previewing. I often have to do the same thing, and there is an easier way.
If you use stage preview (accessible via the "Play" icon" in the lower-left corner of the Timeline panel), Storyline will stay in the slide authoring view and play the timeline of the slide, including any audio or video media that's present. As it plays, you can press the "C" key on your keyboard to have cue points added to the current playback position. It’s a simple way to place cue points in real time, right where they’re needed — perfect for syncing trigger actions to specific moments in your media.
Animated gif depicting Storyline 360's UI and using the "C" key to drop cue points on the timeline.Now I’m curious:
What’s your favorite under-the-radar Storyline feature?
Something small, subtle, maybe even a little obscure — but that you personally couldn’t live without.
Drop it in the comments — I’d love to learn what little gems you rely on. 👇
28 Replies
Animating Bullet Lists
Do you create separate text boxes for each line of text in a bullet or numbered list when you need to time the animation with the narration? There is a better way!
Use a single text box. Select the text box, in the animation tab, select the entrance animation. Next, select the Effect Options drop down and select Paragraph. This will allow you to expand the text box on the timeline and control each individual line of text. If you've added cue points to your timeline using Jesse Taber's hidden gem, you can grab each line and drag it to align it with the cue point. Bonus gem: Creating your bullet or numbered lists in one text box instead of separate text boxes improves your course accessibility. Further, this technique can be applied to text boxes that are not formatted as bullet or numbered lists.
My newest discovery is the ability to hide things on the base layer from a layer. There is a collapsible Base Layer Objects listed in the timeline of all layers. You can click to hide individual things from there if you don't want to hide all of the base layer.
I have this dashboard allowing my learners to visit different parts of the exam in the order they choose. When they return to the main dashboard, my character Walter looks a little different and says something to them. Walter kept popping up from the base layer behind the new character as he animates in the beginning of the slide even though pause timeline on the base layer was checked.
My initial workaround for this was to hide Walter on the base layer with a trigger, like this:
Now I just uncheck Walter on the base layer from each layer.
After learning about this trick from my student Sunita, this serves the same purpose and is much quicker. Walter is hidden on the base layer, and we keep moving along.The ability to select object states directly from the Edit States view without needing to switch back to the timeline or close the Edit States panel to click on the next object. The dropdown within the Edit States view allows you to select any object currently on the timeline and access its states instantly, reducing both the number of clicks and the time spent. I found this especially useful when working with a large number of objects on the timeline, each with multiple states.
