The other day someone asked how to convert their Storyline course into a PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint and Storyline look similar but they are two separate applications. You can import PowerPoint slides into Storyline, which makes it easy to convert some existing PowerPoint content into an interactive e-learning course. However, PowerPoint doesn’t offer a way to import Storyline files.

With that said, there are some ways to convert your Storyline course content into a format you can bring into PowerPoint.

Setting Expectations for PowerPoint Conversion

One of the reasons people like to convert the Storyline content to PowerPoint is so they have a presentation version of the course that they can share with other presenters. If this is something you need to do, I’ll share a few ideas, but you do need to understand that there are some constraints.

• Storyline content is usually interactive with triggers showing layers and object state changes. PowerPoint presentations can be interactive, but they tend to be linear presentations of content. So it’s not an apples-to-apples conversion.
• Whatever you export from Storyline will not be interactive. It’ll either be a video or series of images. That means you can’t isolate text boxes, shapes, or other media to edit on the PowerPoint slides. However, the opposite is true if you want to import your PowerPoint slides into Storyline.
• You can simulate interactions in PowerPoint with hyperlinks to other slides using hotspots, but you can’t get the type of interactivity you get in Storyline. If you really need to retain the interactive elements, then it probably doesn’t make sense to convert to PowerPoint.

With that clear, let’s review a few ideas for getting your Storyline content into PowerPoint.

Save the Storyline Course as a Video

This is easy to do. Publish the Storyline file as an .MP4. As you can see in the image below, you have a number of resolution and quality settings. Once published the final output will be video.

If you do have interactive elements in your Storyline course, you’ll need to set the triggers in Storyline to account for the change from interactive content to a linear video. That includes triggers that show layers and other objects that aren’t initially visible on the base slide.

As far as PowerPoint, all you need to do is insert the video onto a slide.

Screen Capture the Storyline Course and Save as Images

Open the published course in a browser and do a screen capture of the slides (just the slides and not the player). Here are a few options:

• Capture the slides individually by going from slide-to-slide. This is a lot slower, but gives you more control when capturing.
• Capture the course as a video and then output the video as images. Most video editing software has a way to export the video as a series of images. You’ll get an image for each frame. No need to capture at 30 frames per second (fps). I’d capture at a really low frame rate like 2-5 fps so you have less noise when pulling out the images you want.
• Use a tool like ScreentoGif to create a .gif which consists of images and can usually be output as a series of images. It’s an easy process and the software is free.

Once you have the images you need, insert them into PowerPoint slides.

At that point, you can review the pictures and make edits. For example, where you have interactive instructions like the image below, you either add an interactive element to move to another slide or you add a colored shape to cover the instruction.

I like working with images better than video because there’s more flexibility. Video gives you a single file, whereas it’s easier to work with multiple images. You have more control over some customization at the slide level and can more easily introduce interactive elements in PowerPoint.

The one thing you can’t get in the conversion is a PowerPoint slide with separated text, pictures, and shapes. It doesn’t work that way. However, if you need the content in a PowerPoint format, the options above should work.

In a follow up post, I’ll show how to make the video interactive and how to add interactive elements to the slide images.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Before committing resources to your course, it’s important to understand what type of e-learning course you need to build.

E-learning courses tend to be one of two types: information or performance

• Information-based courses are more like explainer courses where the main objective is to share information or offer a linear explanation of the content. This is common for new initiatives where awareness is a key objective to the course. It’s also typical of a lot of compliance training that are less focused on changing behavior and more on awareness of key policies. I tend to think of these less as courses, and more like awareness marketing content.
• Performance-based courses focus on changing performance or some sort of behavior. They’re tied to performance metrics where you can measure before and after changes.

Types of E-learning Courses

Within that context, there are generally three types of courses:

• Information. These courses share information with no performance expectations or changes in behavior. They’re more about awareness such as a company’s policy around certain issues.

Performance-based courses tend to be of two types:

• Procedural. These courses are performance-based as they have a required sequence of events or procedures that need to be followed. This is typical of a lot of machine or software training. There’s not a lot of nuance to the training. There are ten steps and everyone follows them exactly the same.
• Principle. These courses are built around decisions that are more soft-skilled in nature. A procedural course has a clear critical path of steps. However, principle-based training is focused on general guidance or principles that are not always black and white. They’re nuanced where the application to each situation may be a bit unique.

Once you understand what type of course you need to build, you’ll be able to commit the appropriate resources. Information/awareness courses require fewer resources. Often, you’re just re-purposing existing content. Which begs the question why you’re building a course (but that’s a different blog post). Performance courses require more focus on measurable objectives, metrics to determine success, and a nuanced understanding of the content and real-world decisions the learner needs to make.

When I meet with clients, I always try to determine what type of “course” they want to build. I focus on the objectives and try to make sure they’re actionable. Information-based courses don’t always need to be built and performance-based courses usually take longer to build and require more resources. By determining which type of course to build you are better able to allocate and manage your resources.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.

Squoosh.app is a free service from Google that compresses large images. What I like is being able to compare the before and after versions of images. It’s amazing to see how advanced the compression schemes are today. Some of the images I tested were compressed down over 90% and to the naked eye the degradation was negligible without zooming.

As you can see above, the image size goes from 4.4 MB to just under 200 KB. That’s amazing. And the image below shows that the image quality is virtually the same for the naked eye.

You can learn more about the app here. Play around with the app and all of the different settings to see what you can do. Here’s a quick tutorial to see how it works.

Click here to view the tutorial on YouTube.

Final thought:

If you’re using Rise, you don’t really need to worry about compression. Rise will do the work for you. Here’s an example where I inserted the original image (4.4 MB) and the already compressed image (98 KB). In the published output, Rise compressed the original image to 100 KB and as you can see it looks great.

However, if you have a bunch of images to upload, having smaller images may speed up the time it takes to upload your files, especially if you have a slower network connection. Just something to keep in mind.

As a bonus, here’s another site that will do some image compression. And of course, you can always use something like ImageTuner to do batch conversions.

Events

Free E-Learning Resources

Want to learn more? Check out these articles and free resources in the community.	Here’s a great job board for e-learning, instructional design, and training jobs	Participate in the weekly e-learning challenges to sharpen your skills
Get your free PowerPoint templates and free graphics & stock images.	Lots of cool e-learning examples to check out and find inspiration.	Getting Started? This e-learning 101 series and the free e-books will help.