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. 👇
40 Replies
I’m not sure if these count as hidden gems, but as much as they're kind of low-profile features I rely on daily for client projects:
- Web Objects: My go-to for adding external content like games, forms, or other web-based elements into a project.
- Named Motion Paths: Being able to name motion paths makes it easier to keep track of them, especially when an object has more than one.
- Close Other Tabs: On my ultra-wide monitor, I often have 20+ slide tabs open in Storyline. The option to quickly close all other tabs helps keep things organized.
JesseTaber Just a quick note to say thank you and Articulate for all the great updates you’ve made to Storyline over the past few years. Almost every update has made my work easier, and I really appreciate that.
Thank you for the kind words, Montsea !
Wow, didn’t know about the “C” key trick that’s a total time-saver!
Definitely adding this to my workflow for quicker media syncing.The timesaving power of conditional triggers and/or else actions. Instead of creating a trigger to disable the Next button at the beginning of a slide and another trigger to change the state of the Next button to normal after all of the objects or buttons on the slide have been visited, you can do all of this in one trigger.
Hi Melanie - for some reason I'm having trouble visualizing the trigger. If I want the next button disabled when the slide starts, how does the if/else come into play? I've used the else action several times, but for some reason this is making my brain warp!
Hi Trey, sorry for the confusion. I didn't mean to imply that both a condition and an else action is required for that. I was just touting the power of conditional triggers and/or else actions as hidden gems.
Here is an example of controlling access to the Next button, with only a condition on a Quiz Summary slide. If the user did not pass the quiz, they cannot move past it by using the Next button.
The addition of the else action is a huge timesaver.
- If I can remember to not press "enter", I love that the accessibility window updates as soon as I touch a new object.
- The object list dropdown available when I'm editing states, so that I don't have to select "done" after editing an item.
- That I can create states based on a image sequence.
- The translate function, so that I can see all of the text across multiple states in one organized fashion.
My can't-do-without-it hidden gem? The Select option when previewing a course.
That dropdown lets me jump to any slide, so I can switch what I'm previewing.
Even better, when I'm previewing a restricted course, I can easily skip slides and just visit the ones needed for testing. For example, this is handy to make sure a custom menu works, without having to step through all of the content in each section.
HA, I did not know about this and this is now my favourite thing. Great share!
Good tip!!!!
I had no idea!!! This is going to be super helpful. Thank you!
Using transparent shapes as hotspots, because you can change the states of shapes, but you can't change the states of hotspots.
This is the way! Hotspots are great, but transparent shapes are a life saver
I also use a transparent shape to cover up videos on a slide, so the video can't be inadvertently clicked. This is when the video controls are set to Show none.
Brilliant! Wish I had known about this earlier.
