The Format Painter Turbocharges Your Workflow in Articulate Storyline

When you’re creating an e-learning project, it can sometimes be an uphill battle to get your elements to look and act just the way you want. Sometimes it means applying a combination of several different effects to text, images, shapes, captions, buttons, and characters. Manually replicating the same set of effects for many objects is slow, tedious, and gets old really fast. Fortunately, the Format Painter tool in Articulate Storyline applies effects in a snap, so you can avoid a lot of repetitive grunt work.

The beauty of the Format Painter tool is that you can quickly copy attributes from one object to another with just a couple of clicks. You can use it for text boxes, shapes, buttons, captions, characters, and even for quickly replicating states.

To apply the same formatting to multiple objects, select the object with the formatting you want to copy. Double-click the Format Painter button, and then select the objects where you want to replicate that same formatting. When you’re finished, press the ESC key. Here’s a quick screencast to show the Format Painter tool in action:

There’s also a keyboard shortcut for this trick that kicks it up a notch from simply using the Format Painter button. The shortcut stores the formatting you copied until you close out of your Storyline session, so you can reuse a particular formatting sequence in a number of different places as you work. The two keyboard shortcuts are:

• Ctrl + Shift + C to copy the formatting of selected object.
• Ctrl + Shift + V to apply the copied formatting to a new selection.

That’s all there is to it! So go ahead, take the Format Painter out for a spin and see how fast you can apply effects throughout your next project.

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