The deck exists, somebody has decided it should be a course, and the question is how much of it you can reuse. The mechanical answer is that Storyline imports a PPTX and keeps most of it. The useful answer has two halves: exactly what survives that import, and the fact that a deck built for a presenter is not a course and importing it does not make it one.
What survives the import
From Articulate’s own documentation, which is worth reading before a big import rather than after:
| Text and shapes | Editable, with their formatting | Comes across |
| Slide notes | Import as Storyline slide notes | Comes across |
| Tables | Editable with the table tools | Comes across |
| SmartArt | Becomes a group of editable shapes; some formatting shifts | Comes across |
| Most animations and transitions | Entrance, exit, emphasis and motion paths, where Storyline has an equivalent | Comes across |
| Embedded fonts | Not imported. A font you do not have installed becomes Arial | Rebuild |
| Charts and embedded Excel | Not imported at all | Rebuild |
| Equations | Come in as flat images, not editable | Rebuild |
| 3-D rotation | Flattened to an image without the effect | Rebuild |
| Animated GIFs | Import as a still; re-add the original | Rebuild |
| Slide numbers | Not imported; Storyline has its own | Rebuild |
Two practical notes from the same page. Storyline takes PPTX only, so an old .ppt needs saving as .pptx first. And slide size matters: if the deck’s dimensions do not match your Storyline slide size, objects shift on import. Starting the import from Storyline’s start screen sets the size to match the deck, which avoids the whole problem.
Before you import anything
1Get the words out and look at them on their own
Slide text and speaker notes, in one document, away from the design. It is the fastest way to see what the course is actually about, how much of it is narration script already, and how much is a presenter’s prompts that make no sense without the presenter.
2Decide whether it should be a course at all
A deck of forty slides is often a reference document that was presented once. Turning it into forty slides of e-learning produces the thing everybody complains about, and a job aid would have served better. Does This Need To Be A Course? is eight questions and it will sometimes tell you no.
3Estimate the real work
Import time is not build time. What takes the hours is what the deck does not contain: narration, interaction, assessment, accessibility and the design work to make a presenter’s slides survive without the presenter. The Development Time & Cost Estimator gives a defensible range, and the guide behind it explains the numbers.
The trap worth naming
The tempting path is to import the deck, record narration over each slide, add a Next button and publish. It is fast and it is the reason so much compliance e-learning is disliked: bullet points read aloud, at the pace of the slowest reader, with no reason for anyone to be awake.
The deck is source material. The parts worth keeping are the content, the diagrams and the approved wording. What needs building is the structure, which is usually shorter, and the practice, which the deck almost never has.
What about Rise?
Rise 360 does not import PowerPoint. For a deck destined for Rise, the route is the same first step above: pull the text out, decide the structure, and rebuild it in blocks, lifting the images you want from the deck as files. That is more honest work than an import, and often faster than fighting an imported layout that was designed for a projector.