ARTICULATE STORYLINE 360: New Trigger Workflow

If you want to make something happen in Articulate Storyline, Triggers are everything. They're so important to your success in Storyline that we cover them beginning in the opening minutes of our Storyline Beginner class and continue to teach them through the end of the Storyline Advanced class.   A recent Storyline 360 update from Articulate has taken what was already a pretty nice trigger workflow and made it even better. In this article we'll take a quick look at the new workflow. (If you'd like to explore the new workflow, download the latest build.) You can check your version of Storyline via Help > About Storyline. The new trigger workflow can be found in build 3.33.20625.0 or later.

The new trigger workflow will be on by default. However, you can elect to stick with the old, Classic workflow if you prefer. To switch between the new and Classic workflows, choose File > Storyline Options.

Select the Features category and then select Use the new, faster trigger workflow. (You will need to restart Storyline to switch between modes.)

In the image below you can see the classic Trigger Wizard. As I said at the start, I think the wizard was already pretty easy to use. If I had any complaints at all it was with the need to take a few extra clicks to create a Condition. (As you can see, there's a Show Conditions button which leads to a second screen where, after a few clicks, the Condition gets created.)

The new Trigger Wizard, shown below, streamlines/groups things quite nicely. Tops among my favorites is that Conditions have been moved up in the workflow (there's no longer a big button to click that leads to a different window).

When you select Actions (by clicking the link to the right of the word Actions), the options are grouped into appropriate categories, making specific actions easy to find.

The Triggers panel also received a facelift in the new build. Chief among the enhancements is the ability to Disable (you no longer need to delete and recreate individual triggers... with a quick click you can disable them) and Group (when triggers are grouped, you can make a single edit to change the event that triggers all the actions).

If you're still working with developers who are using Storyline 3, there's no worries about the new workflow causing trigger issues. According to Articulate, "The new trigger workflow is fully compatible with the classic workflow in all builds of Storyline 360 and Storyline 3, so you can share a project file with other authors no matter which version of Storyline they’re using. When you disable a trigger in the new workflow, that trigger is present but hidden in the classic workflow in Storyline 360 and Storyline 3."   You can learn more about the new trigger workflow on the Articulate website.

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