Storyline Tips & Tricks: Timeline Edition ⌛

The timeline is one of those panels that’s always open but rarely fully used. Most folks drag things around until it feels right and call it a day.

You don't need to be a timeline expert to build great Storyline courses, but here are a few of my favorite timeline tips that you might find useful:

Align Object to Playhead

Scrubbing to the exact moment you want and snapping objects right to the playhead is way faster than eyeballing start times (especially when paired with the visualization toggle mentioned below). Select one or more objects on the timeline, open the context menu (right click on a timeline object), and select Alignment -> Align Object to Playhead to move the beginning of each selected object to the current playhead position.

Show Until End vs. Show Always

These options do exactly what they say and are a convenient way to control timeline object duration regardless of the overall timeline duration. You can change these options in the timeline object context menu.

Timing dialog for fine tuning

The Timing dialog (also available from the context menu) lets you control the specific start time and duration of timeline objects with precision. You can also change the "Show Until End" and "Show Always" options from here.

Timeline preview from slide view

You don't need to hit Preview every time you want to see how your slide will playback. The play button in the lower-left corner of the timeline panel will play the current slide from wherever the playhead is so you can easily sanity check timings and animations.

 Timeline visualization toggle

Have you ever struggled with laying out a complex slide with a long timeline that has objects entering and exiting at various times? The slide layout becomes really cluttered quickly, making it difficult to understand exactly what will be shown when. This option, available in the upper-right corner of the timeline panel, lets you see only what is under the playhead's current position. Toggling this on lets you drag the playhead around to see how the slide will appear at various points in time. The attached GIF shows this in action.

I'm curious about how others use the timeline. Any handy shortcuts or habits that you swear by? Anything you wish the timeline did better?