Someone has sent you a file ending in .story and your computer has no idea what to do with it. Here is the short version: it is an Articulate Storyline project, it opens in Articulate Storyline, and there is no free viewer, no web player and no converter that turns it into PowerPoint. Double-clicking it without Storyline installed will never work.
That is not the end of the story, though, because most people who go looking for this do not actually need to edit the course. Find yourself in the four cases below.
Which of these are you?
1You need to edit the course
Then you need Storyline, and there is no way around it. It runs on Windows only, it is part of the Articulate 360 subscription, and Articulate offers a free trial if this is a one-off job rather than your day work.
On a Mac there is no native version and Articulate has said there will not be one, so people run Windows in Parallels, VMware or Boot Camp. It works, and on Apple silicon it is less stable than on a real PC, which is worth knowing before you promise a deadline.
2You only need to watch it
Ask whoever sent the file to publish it instead. In Storyline that is two minutes of their time: Review 360 gives them a link they can send you, and they can allow comments from people without an Articulate account. If they publish for Web instead, they get a folder you open by double-clicking the story.html file inside it.
Either beats being sent the project file, which you cannot play even with Storyline installed without building it first.
3You need it in your LMS
A .story file never goes into an LMS. What goes in is the published package: SCORM, xAPI, cmi5 or AICC, published from Storyline as a zip. Ask for that, and say which standard your LMS wants, because the person publishing has to pick one.
If a package lands and the LMS rejects it, our SCORM Package Validator runs the checks most LMSs fail a package on, before you go back and forth with the vendor.
4You need what is inside it, not the course itself
This is the case people underestimate. Quoting a translation, checking how much narration there is, pulling the captions for a transcript, auditing what the file weighs and why, taking the images out. None of that needs Storyline, and none of it needs the file to leave your computer.
Two others read the same file for narrower jobs. Course Word Count gives you the word count a translation quote needs, split by slide text and narration. Bulk Caption Export takes every caption file out at once, named by slide, which Storyline itself will only do one slide at a time.
What a .story file actually is
It is a zip. Specifically it is an Open Packaging Convention container, the same kind of file a .docx or a .pptx is: a folder structure compressed into one file, with the project described in XML under story/ and the assets sitting in story/media/.
Which means you can look inside one without Storyline and without any tool at all. Take a copy, rename the copy from course.story to course.zip, and open it. story/media holds the pictures, audio and video, in their original files. That is the quickest way to rescue a photograph nobody can find the original of.
Two warnings. Work on a copy, always, and never rename the original. And do not edit anything inside and zip it back up: Storyline will reject or corrupt the result. Reading is safe, writing is not.
When Storyline is installed and the file still will not open
- “Created with a newer version”, or it simply refuses in Storyline 3. Storyline 3 projects always open in Storyline 360. The other direction usually works too, but a project that uses a 360-only feature will not open in Storyline 3 at all. The fixes are to update Storyline 3 to its last release, or to have the 360 author avoid that feature. Articulate’s compatibility page lists which features break it.
- “Invalid or corrupt file”. Sometimes the file was damaged in transfer, in which case ask for it again and take it over a link rather than email. Sometimes the project itself is damaged, and Storyline offers recovery copies the next time you open it.
- It opens, then behaves strangely. Check where it is. Articulate’s own guidance is to keep project files on your local drive while you work: opening one straight off a network drive or a USB stick is a documented way to corrupt it. Copy it to your C: drive first, work there, and copy it back afterwards.
- It is a .storytemplate file. Same container, and the same answer: it opens in Storyline, as a template for a new project.
What no tool will do for you
There is no .story viewer, free or paid, and no browser that plays one. Nothing converts a .story into PowerPoint, Rise, Captivate or video. Nothing opens it on a phone. If a site offers to do any of that, the thing it most wants is your file.
The nearest honest thing: if you do have Storyline, publish the course and then run the package through our Course Content Recovery tool, which turns a published course into a storyboard, a question file and a PowerPoint deck with each slide roughed out. It is a head start on a rebuild in another tool, not a conversion, and it says so.