Storyline: How the Enter Key Behaves in Data-Entry Fields
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Here's how the Enter key behaves on question slides and content slides in Storyline.
Question Slides
When there's a data-entry field on a question slide, pressing the Enter key on the keyboard submits your response for evaluation. In other words, pressing the Enter key on the following question slides is the same as clicking the Submit button.
- Graded—Fill in the Blank
- Graded—Numeric
- Survey—Short Answer †
- Survey—How Many
- Freeform—Text Entry †
† You can press Shift+Enter to add line breaks to short-answer surveys and ungraded freeform text-entry questions when the fields are tall enough to allow multiple lines of text.
Essay questions behave differently than other question slides since they're likely to have multiple paragraphs. You can press Enter or Shift+Enter to add a line break (return) in essays.
Content Slides
When you add a data-entry field to a content slide (i.e., a non-question slide), two things automatically happen:
- Storyline creates a variable to hold the data that the learner enters.
- Storyline also creates a trigger that sets the value of the variable to whatever the learner types in the field.
And here's what happens by default when you press Enter or Shift+Enter on content slides with text-entry fields:
- If the text-entry field height is greater than 60 pixels, Enter or Shift+Enter adds a line break (return) so you can start a new paragraph. For example:
- If the text-entry field height is 60 pixels or less, Enter or Shift+Enter assigns the typed value to the variable. For example:
Ensure Text Wrapping
Follow these steps to enable text wrapping for text-entry fields, depending on your version of Storyline.
- In the November 2023 and later updates for Storyline 360, right-click the text-entry field and choose Format Shape. Select the Text Box tab on the left side of the window that appears, then mark the Multi-line box. In the May 2023-October 2023 updates, mark the Wrap text box.
- In Storyline 3 and earlier versions of Storyline 360, increase the height of your text-entry field to 61 pixels or more.