A while ago I had created an interactive screen demo that used a slider to zoom in/out of a map image. I got a question from a Storyline user who, in addition to ‘sliding’ an image, also wanted to simulate a typical Windows scroll bar, with Up/Down buttons to move the window content. Using a Storyline scrolling panel didn’t work in this case, because the user wanted it to look like standard Windows scrollbar. And to add to the challenge, the user wanted to:

• simulate clicking anywhere in the scroll area should jump to the corresponding position in the window
• scroll a very long image (3800 pixels high)

So I thought I’d do a basic example, showing how to ‘fake’ a scrolling window; all in one slide. Starting on the slide’s baselayer, I added a custom button that when clicked shows a layer.

On the layer, I started with the frame for the scrolling window, using an image with a transparent area, that shows the image underneath. The Up and Down buttons on the scrollbar are custom buttons that change a variable. Based on the value of this variable, the state of both the scroll indicator and the image is changed. Since the image was very tall and Storyline only allows images up to 2048*2048 pixels (see here for info), I had to tile the image and use triggers to display the correct tile and its correct state, based on the ScrollCount variable.

Finally, I added transparent shapes that allow user to click anywhere in the scroll bar area to jump to a portion of the report image.

The completed sample file is here.

This “fake” scrolling functionality adds a lot more realism to a software simulation and is well worth the additional development effort. Storyline to the rescue (again)!