Layers overlapping when publishing to Word

Mar 27, 2013

I need some help please with text overlapping when printing my Storyline file. A number of my slides have layers and the base layer text boxes are hidden and don't display when viewing the file. However, when I publish the file to Word the hidden base layer text boxes show on the layer slides so I end up with text overlapping. Only one of the slides with layers prints OK and I've checked the slide properties and triggers and base layer objects and the settings are the same for all the slides with layers. Is there some other setting I should check?  I know there's an option to not print the layers but I don't want to turn that off as I need to show what's on the layers. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

34 Replies
Ruth McElhone

Hi Christine,

One suggestion would be to hide objects on the base layer. you can do this by opening up the properties (gears) of the layer and selecting hide objects on base layer. You will see a little icon  to the right of the layer name. This is the gears.  I just did a test and it worked when I viewed the Word document.

Christine Chieng

Hi Ruth

Thank you for your suggestion. I hid the objects on the base layer for one of the layers and you're right, the text isn't overlapped, however it's not ideal as the background graphics obviously disappear as well. I'm trying to avoid having a different version of the file for printing where I use white boxes to cover the base text. I can't understand how the layers print fine for one slide but not others!

Sid Sinclair

Is there any update on this issue? Not only would this would be a huge help in customer review, but we also publish to a global organization, and look to the Word publishing option as a low-bandwidth alternative. Hiding the base-layer 100% doesn't satisfy all situations; for example, having a graphic of a plant cell on the base-layer, with sub-layers providing descriptions of it's features. In the web publish, selectively hidden elements works nicely! However, when publishing to Word, we have to go back and touch every slide with layers. Hopefully, we can see this issue resolved soon!

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi all,

I wanted to provide an update here, as Storyline 2 Update 10 was just released, and included a number of fixes which you can see in the release notes available here. The item you all may be particularly interested in is how it fixed issue where base-layer objects hidden on layers would show when publishing to Microsoft Word. You can download the latest update here, and after downloading and installing the latest update you’ll want to republish any existing content to ensure that the updates and fixes are applied.

Let us know if you have any questions, either here or by reaching out to our Support Engineers directly.

Jen McIntosh

It seems that update 10 broke something when exporting layers to word. In 3 of my slide layers, the graphics are not showing up. I opened the exact same file on a coworker's computer which is still running update 9 and it is exporting just fine and all graphics can be seen, so I can't think of anything other than the update that could be the issue.

I've tried all the usual suspects like rebooting, uninstalling then reinstalling storyline, but still the same outcome. The file is local, not on a network. Not sure what else I can do. Thankfully the other PC is old and rarely used so it hadn't been updated and I can still get the file to the client, but I hope a fix to your fix is available soon.

Jen McIntosh

OK I think I've managed to de-identify the slide graphics/content enough to post. I also installed update 10 again to export both word files to show the difference. FYI, update 10 also seems to have an issue with the .story file icons on my machine, they show up as the unknown icon as opposed to the little colorful "A" icon for storyline (I'm running 64-bit Windows 7 Pro Service Pack 1).

There are a lot of variables on this slide, so I assume that's what may be causing issues with exporting the images since other slides that had layers in this project were exporting fine on both versions. Perhaps there's a far better way to structure this slide instead of using variables in the way I have, but it was working as intended.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Jen,

Thanks for sharing your file here along with the word published documents. I may be missing something, but the two words docs you shared looked the same too me, and also seemed to match the slide set up? I didn't see a lot of graphics in the slide itself but perhaps that is because you had to remove a lot of them for confidentiality reasons? I also didn't see a lot of variables referenced on the slide and the list of variables only shows 4 total? Perhaps this is the wrong file? 

As far as the icon behavior, that is something our team is aware of broken in Update 10 - and they're investigating. In the meantime, project files and the application should be opening normally and everything should work as expected. 

Jen McIntosh

The graphics on the layers Study 1 Drugs, Study 2 Drugs, and Study 3 Drugs aren't showing in the update 10 word doc I attached. They are in the update 9 doc. They're the last few layers listed so scroll almost all the way down. There should be hexagons with the Drug names and a button to return to studies. Yes there are only 4 variables, but one of them gets used 38 times so I thought that might be related. I've attached a comparison of the graphics on just the Study 1 Drugs layer here so you can see what I mean. I did have to remove a lot of graphics for confidentiality but there's still enough to show the issue.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Jen,

Thanks for sharing that screenshot - the screens looked similar so I was getting lost. I see the behavior you're describing now, but when I tested using those same graphics on your second slide they appeared normally. I also looked at duplicating that slide layer and those did not appear as before - so it seems to be something specific to those graphics while on that layer. Can you confirm that you're working on local project files as detailed here (including the png files that you've inserted)? Have you seen this behavior on any other files or just this file you've upgraded to Update 10? 

Jen McIntosh

Yeah, those same graphics are on practically every slide of my project (19 slides total) and it's only that slide that they don't show up in the word doc on. So it's definitely something specific to that slide. Which is why I immediately assumed the variables, since there are no other slides that use all of them like that. I created the file locally, the png came from a local file, and I publish locally, but it was copied back and forth to a network drive so I can't completely rule that out. I've never seen this behavior on any other file before, and when I downgrade to update 9 the same exact file works fine (I've now upgraded and downgraded my PC at least 4 times since my initial post). Right now I've got update 10 installed again.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Jen,

I did also look at striping out the variables, and that made no difference associated with those graphics on those particular slide layers. Copying the layer to a new slide exhibited the same behavior, but copying the graphics individually did not. You mentioned copying/pasting to a network - perhaps if you opened it while it was still on the network vs. downloading locally first caused the latency and corruption to occur? If you're able to replicate it on another file that you've upgraded from Update 9 to 10, that may give us a bit more information to go on. Have you tried inserting the original graphics again on the layers in a new copy of the file (either doing a save as locally or importing into a new file)? 

Jen McIntosh

I created an entirely new storyline file from scratch locally, using update 10, with a new graphic I just created locally in photoshop. Can still duplicate the problem. Think I finally narrowed it down though... it's due to the image states. If I export to word without clicking on edit states of the image, the image shows up in word. If I do click on edit states (and don't even add a new state, just opening the editor is all it seems to take), then it doesn't show up in the word doc. See new attached file in which the Drug 3 image has not had its state edited, while Drug 1 and Drug 2 have. 

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