Import Questions into Storyline 360 from Excel: Full Spec

How do you import questions into Storyline 360?

Build a spreadsheet with four things in it, then bring it in. Storyline 360 reads XLS, XLSX or TXT files containing a Question Type, Points, Question Text and Answer Choices for each question. Open File > Import > Questions from File, pick the file, tick the questions you want, and Storyline builds a slide for each one. Correct answers are marked with an asterisk at the start of the answer choice.

That is the whole mechanism. What follows is the detail that decides whether an import lands clean or comes back as forty slides you have to repair by hand: the exact type codes, how points behave, the pipe character trick for feedback, and the four limits that are not obvious until something goes wrong.

The three ways to start the import

Storyline gives you the same importer from three places, and which one you use changes nothing about the result:

• On the Storyline start screen, click Import and choose Import questions from file.
• Go to the File tab on the ribbon, scroll to Import, and choose Questions from File.
• Go to the Home tab, click New Slide, scroll to Import, and choose Import Questions.

Storyline then shows a list of every question it found in the file, with check boxes. You are not forced to take all of them, which matters more than it sounds: it means you can keep one master spreadsheet of a hundred questions per course and pull the twenty you want into each module, rather than maintaining a file per assessment.

The same importer exists in Articulate Quizmaker 360, and Storyline can also pull question lists out of an existing Quizmaker quiz or another Storyline course.

What each column has to contain

Four fields drive everything. Question Type is required on every row, and Points are required for graded questions. Answer Choices are required for every type except Short Answer, Essay and How Many, which have nothing to choose from. You can enter up to 10 answer choices per question, and points can run anywhere from -1000 to 1000.

The type column takes a short code rather than a written out name, and getting one wrong is the most common reason a row silently fails to import. Here is the full set:

Code	Question type	Needs answer choices
MC	Multiple Choice	Yes
MR	Multiple Response	Yes
TF	True/False	Yes
FIB	Fill in the Blank	Yes
WB	Word Bank	Yes
MD	Matching Drag and Drop	Yes
MDN	Matching Drop-Down	Yes
SD	Sequence Drag and Drop	Yes
SDN	Sequence Drop-Down	Yes
NUM	Numeric	Yes
LIK	Likert Scale	Yes
PO	Pick One	Yes
PM	Pick Many	Yes
WW	Which Word	Yes
RD	Ranking Drag and Drop	Yes
RDN	Ranking Drop-Down	Yes
SA	Short Answer	No
ESS	Essay	No
HM	How Many	No

Nineteen types is generous, but in practice most imported assessments are MC, MR and TF, because those are the three that survive a bulk workflow. The drag and drop and sequence types import fine, they just take longer to get right in a spreadsheet than they do on a slide.

How do you mark the correct answer?

With an asterisk. Put a * at the beginning of the answer choice that is correct, and Storyline reads it as the key rather than as part of the text. Articulate's own example is *True. On a Multiple Response question you asterisk every option that counts as correct.

Asterisk marking works for true/false, multiple choice, multiple response and word bank questions. That is a narrower list than the nineteen types above, so a matching or sequence question needs its correct pairing expressed a different way in the file, and it is worth building one of each as a test import before you commit a whole course to a format.

Adding per answer feedback with the pipe character

You can carry choice level feedback into Storyline in the same cell as the answer, separated with a pipe. Write the answer choice, then |, then the feedback that should appear when a learner picks that option.

This is the field most teams skip and then wish they had used. A distractor with a one line explanation of why it is tempting and wrong teaches something; a distractor with no feedback just costs a point. If you are importing in bulk anyway, feedback is one extra keystroke per row and it is the difference between a test and a piece of training.

The four limits that break imports

None of these throw a helpful error. They just quietly produce a result you did not expect, which is why they are worth reading before rather than after.

• Only the first worksheet imports. Questions on tab two of your workbook do not exist as far as Storyline is concerned. If you have been organizing a course by module tabs, flatten it first.
• Formatting is stripped. Bold, color, and anything else you styled in Excel is removed during import. Do not use formatting to carry meaning, because the meaning will not arrive.
• Points for incorrect answers are not supported via import. If your scoring model gives partial or negative credit on wrong options, that part has to be set on the slide afterward.
• Numeric questions only support one "Equal to" answer. Ranges and multiple accepted values need to be added in Storyline after the fact.

The first one catches the most people. A spreadsheet organized the way a human would organize it, one tab per module, imports as if it contained only the first module, and the failure looks like the file was truncated rather than like a setting was missed.

Can you import questions into Storyline from a CSV?

Not as a CSV. Storyline's importer accepts XLS, XLSX and TXT, and a .csv file is none of those even though Excel opens it happily. The fix takes ten seconds: open the CSV in Excel and use Save As to write it out as XLSX, then import that. Nothing about the content has to change, only the container.

This trips people up because CSV is the format most question banks and quiz tools export. It is the lowest common denominator between systems, so it is what you get out of a spreadsheet, a database dump, or a generator. Budget one save step in the middle of the workflow and it stops being a problem. The same shape of gap shows up elsewhere in the authoring world, which we cover in how to import questions into Microsoft Forms, where the importer reads Word and PDF but not spreadsheets at all.

Where do the questions come from in the first place?

This is the part the documentation cannot help with. Storyline's importer is excellent at moving questions from a spreadsheet into slides, and completely silent on how a hundred good questions end up in a spreadsheet. For most teams the honest answer is that a subject matter expert wrote them at the end of a long week, which is why assessment quality across a course tends to fall off a cliff after module three.

If the content those questions test already exists as a recording, and in corporate training it usually does, you can skip the blank page. A training video to quiz workflow reads the recorded session and drafts the question set: a stem, four options, the correct answer marked, a short explanation, and the timestamp the question came from. Export that as CSV, save it as XLSX, mark the asterisks, and you have a Storyline import file built from what was actually said in the training rather than from what somebody remembered on a Friday.

The explanation column earns its keep here, because it becomes the pipe delimited feedback in the import file. You are not writing feedback as a separate chore, you are moving a column.

Two honest caveats. The generated draft is a first pass and needs a read before it counts toward anything, and the question types that come out are multiple choice, which covers MC and TF in Storyline but not the drag and drop or sequence types. If your assessment design depends on sequencing or matching, those still get built by hand on the slide.

Does the import create a results slide?

No. Importing questions gives you question slides, not the scoring structure around them. You still add a results slide, point it at the right set of questions, and set the passing score. Storyline will prompt you when you insert one, and it is worth doing before you preview rather than after, because a graded question with nowhere to report is a common cause of "the quiz works but nothing scores."

This is also the point where the reason for the assessment matters. If the training exists because an auditor asked for it, the score is evidence, and the control it maps to usually has to be tracked against a framework like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 as well as recorded in your LMS. If the training exists because a process changed, the per question breakdown is worth more than the pass rate, because it tells you which step people misunderstood.

A workable order of operations

1. Decide the question types first. If it is all MC, MR and TF, the whole set can come from one spreadsheet.
2. Draft the questions from the source material rather than from memory, so coverage matches the content.
3. Build one row per question: type code, points, question text, then answer choices with an asterisk on the correct one and a pipe before any feedback.
4. Flatten everything onto the first worksheet and save as XLSX.
5. Import a test file of three questions, one of each type you plan to use, and check what arrived.
6. Import the full set, add the results slide, set the passing score, and preview before publishing.

Step five is the one people skip and the one that saves the afternoon. Three rows tell you whether your type codes, asterisks and pipes are right. Finding out on row eighty is a rebuild.

When Storyline is not the right destination

Storyline is an authoring tool, and a course built in it publishes as SCORM or xAPI into an LMS. That is the right shape when the assessment is part of a designed course with navigation, scenarios and branching. It is heavy when all you needed was a knowledge check after a recorded session.

For that lighter job the question bank does not need to become a course at all. A QTI package imports into Canvas, Blackboard or Brightspace as a native quiz with per question results and no authoring step, and a share link works when nothing has to be recorded. If you are still deciding which tool should own this in your stack, the comparison of video quiz software lays out which tools generate questions, which ones only host them, and where each one's reporting stops. And for recurring programs rather than one off checks, the corporate training quiz generator page covers completion records and how scores reach an LMS.

Storyline's importer is not the bottleneck in any of this. Writing a hundred good questions is. Solve that part and the spreadsheet step takes ten minutes.