Outlining V Storyboarding

I’ve always been an outliner, and a mindmapper, and never been happy storyboarding. In trying to move up from Powerpoint/OpenOffice Impress to flash based tools like Captivate for presentations, I’m finding the storyboard way of developing materials frustrating – I can’t easily move elements of my narrative from one slide to another the way I can with a tool that supports proper, fully nested and levelled outlines.  If you have ever worked with any tool which support proper outlining, and uses styles (Heading1, Heading2, Heading3) to mark it out, you’ll know how frustrating it can be when you need to move this into a format which allows more interaction to engage and hold students attention. I was particularly annoyed by the way Captivate just turns Powerpoint slides into flat images and loses the outline.

If I’m revising a lecture in almost any mindmapping tool, I can rejig it by dragging things around the page. I can move from most good mindmapping tools to most decent wordprocesors, and the parent-child outline levels will carry over and can be moved around using Outline mode in Word or the Navigator in OpenOffice Writer. I can import that outline into Powerpoint, and it will turn the outline into a series of slides, breaking each one on the right header level. Move that into Captivate and the outline structure is gone – now all I have is a series of images. If I feel that these 2 points from this slide and that point from the other belong together on a new slide, I have to edit them the hard way, copying from the original location to the new and making sure I bring all the ‘child’ points, and notes, along as well.  I have the same problem with OpenOffice Impress – it doesn’t see the presentation as a whole story, but rather as a collection of slides.

This is odd because storyboarding tools are supposed to be about telling a story. If you want to tell the story slightly differently, you would think they should make it easier to drag elements of the story from one slide to another.  Yet, in many ‘storyboard’ based tools, the editing view is different to the storyboard view. As a result, you cannot, in ‘storyboard’  or slide sorter views, drag parts of your story from one slide to another – to do that you need to open the slide in ‘edit’ view, copy, close the slide, open the other slide and paste in.  Since all of these tools now understand XML, and often use it in their file formats, you would think it should be easy to provide a proper outliner mode in tools like Captivate.


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