Story View is a new concept for those transitioning from Articulate Studio and one that you're likely to grow quite fond of. Story View, similar to the Slide Sorter View in PowerPoint, shows all the slides in your project, providing a big picture view of the entire project.

The following screenshot is a sample course in a Story View. You can see the slides are organized into groups. The groups are called scenes. Scenes help to visually organize content into logical segments similar to chapters in a book. There are no hard and fast rules of when and how to use scenes other than logical breakpoints. You could have all of your content on slides within a single scene; but as you start working with Storyline, you will appreciate the ability to group topics together.

Outside of visual organization, scenes also play a role in the menus of a project as each scene by default becomes a submenu in the navigational structure. This can be overridden of course, but by default it offers another compelling reason to use scenes; to expedite navigational refinement that is part of the publishing process.

You can clearly see from this vantage point how content flows from one slide to another. As projects become larger and more complex, you will find Story View indispensable for organizing and managing project content.

When working on an individual slide, you'll most often use the Normal View. This view is quite similar to PowerPoint and will be familiar to Articulate Studio users.

Normal View can be accessed in a few different ways, including the following:

Once in Normal View, you can toggle back to Story View by clicking on the Story View tab, clicking on the Story View button, or choosing View | Story View from the ribbon as shown in the following screenshot:

In both views, you will notice a zoom slider in the lower-right corner. You can use this to adjust the viewing size of the slide or the viewing size of the scenes and slides, depending on if you are in Normal or Story View.

The far right side of the slider displays a fit to window button that you may find useful to quickly fit the slide or Story View content back into the available screen space.

The slider is a quick method of controlling zoom levels. You can also do this by holding the Ctrl key and moving the track wheel up or down (using a mouse that has a track wheel).

The default size for a story is 720 px x 540 px. This refers to the slide size, and is the same 4:3 aspect ratio and slide size as a default PowerPoint file. The project size will be larger in dimension when published, since the player (the interface that appears around the perimeter of the slides) can consume up to 260 pixels in width and 118 pixels in height.

You can adjust the story size at any time, but it's best to do this before adding content. This is because existing slide content is rescaled to fit the new slide dimensions, which could result in text appearing smaller or larger than you'd like and graphics being stretched disproportionately.

The setting to adjust the story size and the option to control it is found under the Design tab.

You can adjust the story size from the default to any size you'd like. The 720 px x 540 px default is a 4:3 aspect ratio, while the 720 px x 405 px preset is a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. If selecting a custom size, you can decide whether or not you want to lock the aspect ratio.

There are two options that you can work with to control the result of resizing, depending on whether the new size is larger or smaller than the existing story dimensions.

When sizing a story, you have the option to scale the contents of a slide to fit proportionately within the new size. Sometimes, scaling produces undesirable results, such as stretching images. You may opt to work with non-scaling options instead. If the size of the story is larger, you can choose to scale the background only, leaving the objects on a slide unchanged. If the size is smaller, you have the option to crop content to fit within the new size.

Here are some examples of the effects sizing has on slides with content:

As you can see, it's possible to adjust story size when you have content on a slide, but it takes a little tweaking to get the right result. You'll save time by adjusting the size of your story to its final dimensions before you begin developing content.

Storyline offers features that help you leverage work you've already done in PowerPoint, Articulate Studio '09, and even other Storyline files. Although Storyline does a very good job at accurately transitioning content from other sources, there are variances. The variances are largely related to different formatting and feature support between the products.

There are two main methods of importing content; from the launch menu at start-up or from within an open project:

Selecting slides

After selecting a PowerPoint file, Storyline will display thumbnail images for all slides in the presentation. By default, all slides are selected, as indicated by a yellow border around each selected slide. You can change this by clicking on and selecting just one slide, or by using Shift + click or Alt + click, or you can select all slides again using Ctrl + A. The imported content will appear in the current scene or a new scene depending on your Insert into scene selection.

Once done, slides will appear in Storyline and you can freely edit the objects on the slides and apply formatting and functionality to them.

Importing Articulate Quizmaker content

Importing a Quizmaker file is straightforward and works well. Storyline maintains most of the original formatting and functionality, making it a snap to rapidly incorporate existing quizzes into your Storyline projects.

One consideration is that Quizmaker has a default slide size of 686 px x 424 px whereas Storyline defaults at 720 px x 540 px. For that reason, you can expect some minor formatting to tweak the alignment of text and graphics.

Articulate Quizmaker files have an extension of .quiz. After selecting a .quiz file to import, Storyline will display thumbnail images for all the slides in that quiz, divided into sections based upon the question groups they are in. As with other methods of importing, you can select one, a few, or all of the slides to import into Storyline.

Once done, the questions, feedback, and results are 100 percent editable in Storyline.

Importing Articulate Engage content

Unlike importing PowerPoint slides and Quizmaker files, Engage content cannot be modified within Storyline except for resizing the interaction on the slide. In order to modify Engage content, you must be working in Articulate Engage.

Importing Engage interactions provides the ability to playback previously created interactions without having to rebuild them in Storyline. However, you may want to rebuild them, as Storyline contains all of the features of Engage plus some that take interactions to the next level in terms of look, feel, and functionality. Another reason to rebuild them is that they are Flash interactions and Flash does not playback on most mobile devices or the iPad.

The steps to import an Engage interaction are the same as with PowerPoint and Quizmaker.

Importing Storyline content

This sounds unusual but it's a really neat feature of Storyline. Being able to import Storyline files lets you combine content in a smart way; you can pick and choose specific slides from certain project files to import. The look, feel, and functionality are imported. This is a great feature for re-usability where you create a library of your own interactions and layouts, then re-use them inside many different projects.

It won't take long to start to accumulate content in your story, especially when working with pre-built templates or importing content from external sources. It's a good idea to save your work often and it is recommended that Articulate files are saved locally instead of on network drives or USB sticks, to prevent file errors.

There are three ways in which you can save your story:

Storyline files are saved with a .story extension.

This chapter introduced some of the basics of the Storyline interface, including two new concepts for PowerPoint and Articulate Presenter users: Story View and scenes.

Story View is a powerful new way of looking at your project content. You can see how slides are grouped into scenes, and the navigational relationships between slides and scenes.

With these basics in hand, including configuring story size, working with templates, and importing content from external sources, you're now ready to add text and images into your story and make it sparkle and shine using Storyline formatting and animation techniques.