Storyline 3: Adding Zoom Regions

Give learners a close-up view of a portion of your slide by adding a zoom region. It's a great way to draw attention to important content.

For example, you might have an image of a machine control panel, and you want to emphasize a critical switch on the panel as the narrator describes it. Or, maybe you have a video of a software demo, and you want to zero in on a section of the screen at a specific point in the video.

• Adding Zoom Regions
• Changing the Speed of Zoom Regions
• Deleting Zoom Regions

Adding Zoom Regions

Zoom regions must be added to the base layer of a slide. Layers don’t currently support zoom regions.

You can add as many zoom regions to a slide as you want. You can even use consecutive zoom regions to create a panning effect.

1. Go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and click Zoom Region.
2. Storyline adds a rectangle to your slide to represent the zoom region. (It’ll have the same aspect ratio as your slide to prevent content from skewing or stretching.) Everything outside the zoom region dims temporarily to indicate you're in zoom edit mode.
3. Size and position your zoom region:
   • Drag the corner handles of the zoom region to adjust its size.
   • Drag the zoom region anywhere on your slide.
4. Click anywhere outside the zoom region to exit zoom edit mode. Your slide will return to its normal appearance, and the boundary of the zoom region will change to a dashed green outline. (The outline won't be visible in your published output.)
5. Use the timeline to adjust the timing and duration of a zoom region. It'll always appear as the topmost item on the timeline.
   • To change the timing, just drag it left or right along the timeline.
   • To change its duration, drag its left or right boundary (to shorten or lengthen it).

Changing the Speed of Zoom Regions

Zoom regions default to a speed of "medium," but you can change that. You can even make them instantaneous.

To change the zoom speed, right-click the zoom area on your slide, scroll to Zoom Transition Speed, then choose a speed.

Deleting Zoom Regions

To delete a zoom region, just select it and press the delete key on your keyboard.