Timing, Duration and Order of The Objects Using Timeline

Audio Transcription

In this tutorial, I have demonstrated how to re-arrange the order of the objects in the timeline based on our requirements. Also discussed on modifying the timing and duration of the objects using timeline.

Hello and welcome back to the fourth section in Articulate Storyline training series.

In the previous video we have seen, “how to use the timeline interface”. In this video we will see how to modify the timing, duration and order of the objects using timeline.

All the objects placed on the slide will be listed in the timeline. These slide objects are stacked on the slide in the order they are listed in the timeline. So the first object in the timeline will be stacked on top of all the other objects in the slide and the last object in the timeline stays below all the other objects. We can change the order based on the requirement by clicking and dragging an object up or down.

For instance, we have this green rectangle placed over this image to create a green tint effect. We can also change the order of the objects by right clicking and selecting “bring to front” option to place this object above all the other objects or, we can select “bring forward” option to move it one step upwards.

Similarly, we can select “send to back” option to place the object below the rest of the objects or, select “send backward” option to move it one step downwards. We can also find the same features by clicking the “arrange” option under home tab.

So, in this way we can re-arrange the order of the objects in the timeline based on our requirements.

Using this timeline we can control the object timing to appear on the slide. For instance, let’s say when the slide starts playing, I want this first bullet point to appear after 3 seconds have passed. I can simply select this text box in the timeline and drag it to align with the 3 seconds point in the timeline scale.

Now let’s preview and check the slide. So, as we can see our first bullet point appears after 3 seconds. But it doesn’t disappear as soon as the next set of bullet points appear and it overlaps with the third bullet point.

So, in order to fix this, we must reduce the duration of first bullet point where the third bullet point starts. The third bullet point appears after 11 point 5 seconds. Let’s reduce the first bullet point duration by clicking and then dragging the right end of this object to align with the 11 point 5 seconds point in the timeline scale.

Let’s preview again and check whether the issue has been resolved or not.

This time the first bullet point appears after 3 seconds and it disappears as soon as the next set of bullet points appear. In this way we can control the timing and duration of the slide objects.

Now, here we have one more issue. The second set of bullet points disappear when the slide finishes playing. Whereas in the timeline these bullet points durations are set till the end. To fix this we need to right click on the object and select show till the end. Then this little arrow appears which indicates that the object will stay on the slide even after the timeline has finished playing.

If we right click on an object, we can see 2 more options, “show always” and “timing”. If we select the “show always” option, this object’s duration will become equal to the slide duration so that the object will appear from beginning to the end of the slide.

And, if we select the timing option, the timing pop up appears in which you can manually set the start time, duration, show until end and show always options. It is same as setting the timing and duration by dragging an object layer which we did earlier.

We can also set the timing of these objects using the play head or by adding cue points to the timeline. We will see how to do it using play head and cue points in the next video.