by Kevin Siegel 
If Microsoft PowerPoint is your starting point for developing eLearning content, you can reuse that content in any of the top eLearning development tools including Adobe Presenter, Adobe Captivate, and TechSmith Camtasia Studio.
This week I'm going to show you how to use Articulate Storyline and PowerPoint to jump start the eLearning development process.
You can either create a new Storyline project using a PowerPoint presentation or import PowerPoint content into an existing Storyline project. In the image below, notice that there is an Import PowerPoint menu item on Storyline's Welcome screen.
After clicking Import PowerPoint and opening the PowerPoint presentation, the Import Slides dialog box opens. You can select all of the PowerPoint slides or pick and choose. Once you've selected the slide(s) you want, click the Import button.
The PowerPoint slides are imported into the Storyline project as Storyline slides and you'll end up in Story View.
Unlike Camtasia (where the presentation becomes one, uneditable video), or Captivate (where each slide is converted to an uneditable video), opening a Storyline slide reveals an interesting possibility: the original PowerPoint slide objects can be manipulated. For instance, in the image below, the PowerPoint text box says "To continually develop…"
Without leaving Storyline, I was able to edit the text in the image below to "To usually develop…"
The ability to edit the PowerPoint content directly in Storyline is awesome. However, there is no link between Storyline and the original PowerPoint presentation. If your subject matter expert is still making changes to the original PowerPoint presentation, you won't see those changes in Storyline (moreover, you'll have to make those changes in Storyline yourself). If the PowerPoint presentation is a moving target, you might want to wait until all of the PowerPoint edits are final prior to importing the presentation into Storyline. As I showed you last week, a Captivate project and original PowerPoint presentation can be linked. If the PowerPoint presentation is updated, you can easily get those updates to appear in Captivate. You might want to keep this fundamental difference between Captivate and Storyline in mind when choosing between the two development tools.
According to Articulate Support, here are some other limitations you should keep in mind when importing PowerPoint content:
- Imported text may not look the same way it does in PowerPoint. You may find some variations in font size, line spacing, alignment, colors, or bullets.
- Presentation size: If your PowerPoint presentation is a different size than your Storyline project, you may need to make adjustments to the size and placement of objects after importing them. Or, you can change your story size to match your PowerPoint presentation before importing.
- Embedded fonts: Storyline doesn't support embedded fonts from PowerPoint. If a font used in the PowerPoint presentation isn't installed on your computer, Storyline will apply the default Articulate font to the imported text.
- Animations and slide transitions: PowerPoint entrance and exit animations are supported in Storyline and will be imported–though some will be converted to Fade animations. Similarly, some PowerPoint slide transitions are supported in Storyline, while others get converted to Fade transitions. Emphasis animations and motion paths aren't supported and won't be imported into Storyline.
- SmartArt Graphics will be imported as images.
- Tables will be imported as images.
- Equations will be imported as images.
- Slide numbers won't be imported into Storyline.
- 3-D rotation: Objects with 3-D rotation will be imported as images without 3-D rotation.
- GIF images: Animated GIFs will be imported as static images.
- Line thicknesses: Border and line widths may appear slightly different in Storyline.
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