Storyline 2 has heaps of great functions to help create fantastic eLearning, so many in fact, it’s hard to know them all. But in the past couple of weeks I’ve come across three hidden ones (well, hidden to me) that I wish I had known earlier. I wanted to share them here because if they’re new to me, chances are they’ll be new to someone else too.

#3 – Moving Objects with Arrow Keys

Ok, I’ve known for a while that you can move objects (shapes, text boxes, images) using the arrow keys but sometimes I found that they didn’t move far enough and then the next move was too far! That’s because when you move something with an arrow key, it moves by 8 pixels at a time.

But if you hold down the CTRL key and press the arrow key, it just nudges the object by just 1 pixel! This is really good for making those fine on-screen adjustments.

Note: You can also do this in PowerPoint.

#2 – Size and Position

This comes in handy when you want to have different objects in the same place on-screen across different slides. To find the position of an object:

Select the object and right-click:

Select Size and Position

Then click on Position:

You’ll see the horizontal and vertical position of the object on the slide. In this case it’s from the top left corner but you can change it and go from the centre. Now you can line up your objects on different slides by using the same position for each!

Note: You can do this in PowerPoint too.

#1 Hiding Base Layer Objects via the Timeline

When working with layers, have you ever wanted to hide some of the objects on the base layer? I sure have! SL2 does give you the option to hide all objects on the base layer and when I’ve wanted to only hide some of them I thought you had to a shape to cover them up. But it can be done using the timeline.

Click on the layer.

Look at the Timeline and you’ll see a tiny little arrow near Base Layer Objects:

Click on the arrow and it will now point down and all the objects on the base layer will be shown:

Next to each object is an ‘eye’ symbol.

Click on the eye of the objects that you want hidden (it will turn grey and the objects will hide on screen).

Here’s a before:

And After:

Each time you are on that layer the objects you’ve selected will be hidden. You could have different settings for different layers if you wanted too.

Well that’s it, three little functions I’m glad I now know about. Hopefully they’ll come in handy for you too!

Special thanks to Beck and Ruth for telling me about these three gems.