New features in Articulate Storyline

It has become something very usual to have to update our authoring tool for developing eLearning modules. From an efficiency and security perspective, it is always a good practice to keep up with the most current version of the software we use, as it is our case with Articulate Storyline.

For the most part, these updates usually fix bugs that were introduced with other updates, or fix vulnerabilities that have been found and that could cause an issue for either the developers or the consumers, and in reality these updates do things to the authoring tool that are not palpable, in the sense that it’s not something we see or interact with when developing eLearning courses.

That being said, once in a while there are updates that add functionality that we, as developers, have been requesting for quite some time. That’s the case in the most recent update of Articulate Storyline. Just to mention a few, here are some examples of features that have been added and make our lives easier:

• Timeline Visualization: This is an interesting feature that helps you deal with multiple elements on the slide, for example if it’s heavy on animation and you have elements constantly coming in and out of the screen. By enabling this feature, you only see the elements that are being overlapped by the timeline, which helps you to easily modify items without having to worry about hiding elements (and then forgetting to make them visible again) that are not present at that time in the slide.

• Fit timeline to longest object: This is another very helpful feature, because it helps you reduce the duration of the timeline of one slide and helps you to easily avoid long silences at the end of the slides. For example, if you duplicate a slide because the layout is useful, but it happens that the audio file is shorter, you can easily use this new feature to make sure the timeline only goes to the end of the audio file, without having to scroll all the way to the end of the timeline and then drag it back to match the length of the audio file.

• Dragging multiple elements up and down the timeline: This is something I was looking forward to for some time, because there are occasions in which you need to bring various elements to the back or the front of the screen; in previous versions you had to do it one by one as the software wouldn’t let you to easily do it with more than one element, however in recent updates this feature was included, which has helped me save some time.