3 Articulate Storyline shortcuts you need to know

If you read my last blog about Vyond, you’ll know that I love a time-saving shortcut. This also applies to Articulate Storyline shortcuts. Today I’m going to share with you my three favourite short cuts in the award-winning authoring tool.

Shortcut #1: Adding placeholder text

There is always a time and place for placeholder text. Whether that’s mocking up a template, or numerous designs for stakeholders to choose from. If you’re anything like I was before learning this hack, you’d google Lorem Ipsum, and copy and paste from one of the first websites that appeared. A bit long winded, right?

So, you can imagine how excited I was to find out that Articulate have built a shortcut for placeholder text. All you need to do is:

Insert a text box. Type = Lorem() and hit enter!

Shortcut #2: Adding cue points to the timeline

This was my favourite tip from our Articulate Storyline training course, and one I use all the time. If you have a lot of audio in your eLearning course, chances are you’ll want to align some on-screen animation with the audio.

You could spend hours making this all align perfectly by watching the slide play a hundred times, or you could use cue points.

Simply play your audio and hit the ‘C’ key on your keyboard every time you’d want something to move on screen.

Then in your timeline, right click the object you want to move, and select ‘align to cue point’.

Then hey presto! Your onscreen animations are perfectly synced with your audio.

Shortcut #3: Showing gridlines

If you’re a perfectionist like me (which you probably are, most of us in the digital learning world are!) you’ll want everything on your slide to be pixel perfect. So, the third Articulate Storyline shortcut I’d like to share with you is hiding, or showing, gridlines.

This one is simply as easy as clicking Shift + F9 on your keyboard, which will give you this perfect grid box to use to align your objects:

Bonus tip: Create your own shortcuts

Forget my favourite Articulate Storyline shortcuts, you can create your own! You can save heaps of time by adding features to the Quick Access Toolbar. Simply right-click the button for any feature and select ‘add to quick access toolbar’.

Then, to make these keyboard shortcuts all you need to do is click ‘alt’ and the number of the shortcut you’d like to use. For example, I’ve added ‘New slide’ to my quick access toolbar, and it’s currently in fourth place, so typing Alt + 4 adds a new slide!

It’s probably good to also know that save, undo and redo are automatically in the quick access toolbar. Click Alt + 1 to save, Alt + 2 to undo and Alt + 3 to redo.

So, there you have my favourite Articulate Storyline shortcuts, what are yours? Pop them in the comments below!