Instagram stories don't hang about for long, so you need to make an impression fast. Stories are supposed to have a narrative - a beginning, a middle and an end - so you need at least three segments, and probably no more than five to keep it fresh. Then you can upload your segments at intervals during a given time period. Our story is a Saturday morning coffee promotion - so the idea is that the slides get uploaded to an Instagram feed at intervals during a busy morning.

Take a look at our templates for inspiration. You will notice that the story templates are larger than the standard Instagram templates because they will fill the available screen. 

So here I'm starting with one of the templates...

It's got 4 slides - but I only want 3 so I'm deleting one by tapping on the thumbnail and choosing Delete.

Now for the first slide - tap the thumbnail to select...

Now I'm going to replace the main photo - tap to select and then choose Replace.

Looking on the Properties panel on the right I'm going to choose one of the free stock photos - but I can of course choose from any of the other options.

Find your photo and just tap on it to replace... learn more about photo editing here

Now to change the text - just tap anywhere in the text and start typing. You can change the font, font size, color, line spacing, alignment etc. in the Text properties panel.

So now to change the image and text on the two remaining slides - here's slide 2...

And here is slide 3...

Now you have all three ready to go - tap Documents > Download... to download the slides.

From the Download options choose JPEG or PNG - here is the JPEG option, the standard default settings are fine, we've taken care of those for you.

Select All pages (zip file) and tap Download to export your slides as a zip to your download folder.

When you have downloaded your slides the next thing to do would be to move the slides to somewhere accessible so that you can grab them from your phone to upload as an Instagram story - a cloud drive is a good option if you have it synced to your phone. You should then be able to export from your cloud drive to your Instagram feed.

Don't forget to save your Xara cloud file - Documents > Save . This is your master file if you like, then you can come back and re-edit and export any time.