UPDATE: This tool is now deprecated. I hope at some point Articulate will provide a native way to export (and import) variables? Maybe using json? Or XML?

Why export variables?

Have you ever wished you could export all the variables you created in Storyline? Maybe in an Excel sheet to document, share, or add explanations to them? (Because nothing is more foreign than looking at an old course with tons of variables later on…)

I’m speaking at the ATD TechKnowledge conference in San Jose, CA later in January, and I wanted to give the list of variables to the hands-on session participants. Now, you can go to the variable window and one by one copy paste the names and values into a spreadsheet…

Instead, I made a script that automates this export process automatically. It’s called xPorter. Here’s what the process looks like:

The xPorter works only on Windows. If you want to try, just let me know.

UPDATE:

Modified script now works on Storyline 2 and 3 as well but you need to configure your version of Storyline in the xporter.ini file. Open the file with a text editor and change the sl=360 to your version: either sl=2 or sl-3.

How does it work?

The xPorter uses image recognition, and a little bit of coding to identify four things on the Storyline Variables window:

xPorter searches the window for three .png images that match the areas on the screen. With these four locations, it knows “where to click.” The rest is a step-by-step process to open each variable by clicking the edit icon. From the Edit Variable window, it reads the Windows object (no scanning needed here), and grabs the name, type and value.

Then locates the usage link (number underscore), clicks on it to open the usage report. Selects all the content, and copy it to the clipboard.

Finally, xPorter takes all the information, and writes it out to two files. One of them is a .txt file with all the information, including usage. It’s a long file. The one is a .csv file for Excel.

You can open the exported data in Excel, and add explanation/description for each variable. If you change the variable’s initial value, or add new variables in SL, you can run this process again to update the file. Your descriptions will stay intact as long as you keep the name of the variable.

Of course, it is just tinkering and it is not supported by Articulate.