How to compare two Storyline files and see exactly what changed
Two versions of the same course, and a question the slides cannot answer on their own: what is different? Here are the ways to find out, and what each one misses.
Why Storyline can't tell you
Storyline saves the whole course into one .story file and keeps no change history inside it. There is no compare command, no track changes, and no diff between two saved versions. Review 360 collects comments on a published version, which is useful for feedback but says nothing about what a developer changed between publish 7 and publish 8. The only record of change is whatever the developer remembers, or wrote down.
That matters most for the changes nobody can see. A quiz answer flipped from correct to incorrect looks identical on the slide. A trigger that used to jump to the summary and now jumps to the next slide looks identical. A pass score changed from 80 to 70 is one number in a dialog no reviewer opens.
The manual ways, and what each one misses
- Publish both versions and click through side by side. Catches visible changes on the slides you happen to visit. Misses trigger logic, quiz answer marking, variables, and anything on a layer or a branch you did not take. Costs an hour per pass and has to be repeated every round.
- Publish both to Word and compare the documents. Storyline's Word output gives you a slide image and the notes per slide, so a document compare finds changed notes. It contains no triggers, no answer key and no settings, and a changed image is invisible to a text compare.
- Rename both files to .zip, extract, and diff the XML. Everything is in there and none of it is readable. Storyline's XML uses internal IDs that change when a slide is rebuilt, so a raw diff reports hundreds of differences that are not changes and buries the three that are.
What actually needs comparing
A complete comparison covers seven things. A partial one is how quiz flips reach the LMS.
- On-screen text, word by word, including formatting changes.
- Triggers and their conditions.
- Quiz questions, their choices, and which answer is marked correct.
- Media added, removed or replaced.
- Layers, which only appear when something triggers them.
- Course and quiz settings: pass score, time limit, tracking and completion.
- Accessibility text: alt text and captions.
Do it in StoryAudit
Drop the old version and the new version into Compare. It reads both files in your browser (nothing uploads; see the security overview) and matches slides even when Storyline rebuilt a slide's internal ID, as long as the content is the same. What you get:
- A slide-by-slide list: added, removed, changed, unchanged, with filter and search by change type. Question-bank slides are compared too, listed separately at the end. Compare → slide list
- Word-level text diff, with a formatting-change indicator (font, size, color, paragraph styling) on hover. Compare → slide detail
- Trigger changes for named actions (jump, submit, mark complete, run JavaScript and others), including each trigger's condition. Adjust-variable actions and show/hide-layer targets are not parsed yet, and the on-screen legend says so every time. Compare → triggers
- Quiz answer key changes flagged inline on the slide and in the changelog. Compare → changelog
- Media added, removed or replaced, with before and after thumbnails. Compare → Media changes
- Banners for changed course and quiz settings, changed slide-master trigger logic, and changed alt text or captions, with before and after text. Compare → banners
- A “What changed” summary you can copy as text, and an export as text, JSON, self-contained HTML, PDF or email, with per-section include and exclude toggles. Compare → What changed
It also warns when the two files are byte-identical, or when they look like two different courses rather than two versions of one.
The sample comparison runs on a bundled course, no file of your own and no sign-up. Open it, read the changelog, and decide whether this beats clicking through.
Try the sample comparison →When the old file is gone
Save a snapshot after any Compare or Health Check run: a small .json file that stands in for the .story you compared. Next round, drop the new file against the snapshot and get the same changelog without keeping every old version around. Batch Check does the same for a whole folder, with a per-course changelog export.