Forum Discussion
Ways to automate repetitive tasks?
Putting feelers out for suggestions on whether/how we can automate repetitive edits to existing Storyline files. Here are some of the edits we're spending a lot of time on, along with the not-ideal manual work that we're currently doing:
1. Broken links. A page has moved and so the link is now dead across multiple Storyline files. We're currently changing the URL on each trigger one by one.
2. Hyperlink formatting. We have multiple existing courses (some of which consist of multiple files) where the hyperlink formatting (font color, etc.) needs to be updated. Currently, we have to go into each Scene of each file, put the cursor into a textbox and modify the hyperlink text style. The text style modifications don't consistently carry across to the other Scenes in the file, so each Scene has to be checked or updated individually. After all of those text style modifications, the existing hyperlinks don't always update to the new formatting, so then each URL trigger has to be deleted and re-done.
3. Making objects not visible to accessibility tools. Many existing courses have decorative items visible; the decorative items are often header/footer items that appear on many/all slides of a project. We're currently going through each slide to make those items not visible.
(I'm aware issues 2 and 3 can be avoided/decreased by setting up Slide Master layouts and formatting before content development; however, we also have existing projects we need to update.)
We have some other repetitive tasks. Does anyone have experience with automating the above or other repetitive/time-consuming edits?
3 Replies
I know that it has been a long time, but are you still having this issue? Maybe others are having the same issue still?
For anyone else facing these issues:
- If possible, redirecting the URL itself would be the quickest fix. Otherwise no, you will need to update these individually.
- Hyperlink formatting is included in the theme's colour and text styles. See this article for details.
- If these objects are included in your Master slide, you can change it there to affect all other slides using that master. You can also edit alt text for all instances of the same image in the Media Library. Otherwise, I always recommend considering accessibility from the outset. If you define your alt text (or lack thereof) from the first instance, every time you copy that object, it will retain that setting.
Others have answered this question in depth, so I'll only add to it. #1 was a problem that I've run into over and over; my solution was to point URLs to areas that I controlled so that I could be sure they wouldn't change. Depending on your organization's internal politics, that may not be possible, of course. If you can't control it, then a redirect is your best bet.
