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Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Setting a Default Object Style

by Kevin Siegel  

I enjoy creating eLearning lessons using Adobe Captivate. Nevertheless, it's work and I make every attempt to produce and publish my projects as quickly and efficiently as I can. In fact, I am always looking for ways to save steps, and I'm all about getting something done with fewer and fewer clicks.

With fewer clicks in mind, I'm going to show you a quick Captivate setting that could save you at least one click every time you insert an object onto a slide. (Just one click you say? Don't discount even minor savings. One click saved here, another there... and you're golfing!)

I'd like to insert a standard text caption onto a slide. The task is simple enough. Choose Insert > Standard Objects > Text Caption.

I'd also like to assign a specific Object Style to the new text caption. This process is also simple. Select the text caption and use the Style drop-down menu on the Propertiespanel.

As I said, the steps are simple, but allow me to simplify things even further... and save you a few clicks in the bargain.

Open the Object Style Manager via the Edit menu. From the center of the dialog box, select a style. Lastly, from the right of the dialog box select Set As Default. 

 

The next time you insert a text caption, the caption will already be using the style you set as default. Think of all of the clicks you'll save!

If you're not an Object Style Manager fan, I have another way of setting a default object style. Go ahead and insert the object as you normally would. Then, on the Propertiespanel, select a style from the Style drop-down menu. Lastly, select Set as the default style.  From that point forward, the selected style will automatically be applied to newly inserted objects. 

 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Troubleshooting Cranky Software

by Kevin Siegel  

By this point I've created hundreds upon hundreds of eLearning projects using Captivate. In all that time, Captivate has remained very stable for me (very few crashes and zero corrupt projects). Nevertheless, I've received some emails over the last few weeks from Captivate developers who were having issues with Captivate crashing, running slowly or otherwise behaving erratically. In the vast majority of the cases, the following resolved the issues.

Editing over a network drive: Captivate projects simply cannot be edited over a network drive. Backing up your projects to a network drive is a great idea. But if you open a project and then proceed to edit it over a network drive, the project will behave erratically, work slowly and, sooner or later, become corrupt. Take my advice (and the advice of any developer who has lost a project), stay clear of your network drive. If your project is currently on a network drive, first copy the project to your local drive and then edit it.

Run as administrator. If you are using Windows Vista or 7, and you are working locally but Captivate is still behaving badly, try running the software as an Administrator. You can Captivate as an Administrator by right-clicking the Captivate application icon and choosing Run as administrator.

Virus Scanners: Many virus scanners scan your hard drive 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The scanners are well-meaning but can rob your computer of performance and block all kinds of processes... even Captivate processes. I'd suggest stopping your virus scanner while you're working within Captivate. Instead, schedule the virus scan during hours when you aren't asking your computer to perform intense processes (like producing a Captivate project).

Clear Captivate's Preferences: If Captivate is performing strangely, you can delete the Preferences folder and see if that shakes things up. Close Captivate, find the Preferences folder on your computer (see below) and then restart Captivate. The Preferences folder will be recreated when Captivate starts. If you are nervous about deleting the Preferences folder, make a backup of the folder first and copy it to a trusted location. Then delete the original.

Note: The Preferences folder won't be actually be called "Preferences." Instead, it will have the same name as your version of Captivate. For instance, since I have both Captivate 5 and 5.5 on my computer, I have two Preferences folders, one called "Captivate 5," the other called "Captivate 5.5."

Here is where your Preferences folder can be found (it's a bit different dependent upon your operating system and version):

Windows 7: C:\Users\[user name]\AppData\Local\Adobe\Adobe Captivate   

Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Captivate

Mac:  /Users/[user name]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Captivate 

See also: Captivate's Cache Feature 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Switch TTS Agents in a Snap

by Kevin Siegel  

During every Captivate beginner class, time is spent on the second day teaching everyone how to use Captivate's Text-to-Speech feature to convert slide notes into speech.

Recently, one of the students asked an excellent question: "Is there an easy way to change my mind? I'd love it if there was a pain-free way to quickly change the agent from Kate, to Paul and then maybe back to Kate."

You can switch between one agent to another. The solution, while easy, isn't obvious. Here's how:

First, go through your project and convert the slide notes to speech. If you're not sure how, review this article.

After you've committed to an agent, changing your mind is just as easy as selecting the original agent. Choose Audio > Speech Management to open the Speech Management dialog box.

In the image below, notice that different agents have been used between the two slides. 

 

Select all of the notes for a slide and then, from the Speech Agent drop-down menu, select an agent. In the image below, all three notes are selected for Slide 1 and that Paul is being selected from the Speech Agent drop-down menu. (Note: you can only select the notes for more than one slide at a time; you'll need to repeat the process for each slide.)

 

The final step is to simply click the Generate Audio button and you're all set.

 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate: Reuse Text to Speech

The Adobe Captivate BLOG features a video that goes into Captivate's Text to Speech feature and how to reuse audio files in multiple projects.

Read more

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: It's Alive... Preview

by Kevin Siegel  

Last week I wrote about how you can save and share effects you've added to the Effects panel (so the effects can be used in other projects or by other developers). I'd like to stick with the Effects theme for another week. If you've used the Effects panel, there's a good chance that you've missed a useful feature--it's often overlooked by even veteran developers.

The most common way to preview an effect or a slide animation is to either Preview the project, the next 5 slides or from the current slide (these options are all found via File > Preview).

If all that I really need to see is a quick preview of a slide containing effects or animations, it seems reasonable that choosing File > Preview > Play this Slide would be the perfect preview option (the others are simply overkill). If you use the Play this Slide option, you will see slide objects such as captions and the mouse pointer transition and appear on the screen based on the Timing you set up. However, you won't see any effects, videos or slide animations, which kind of renders Play this slide useless.

There is a wonderful alternative to prevewing a single slide, but it's not obvious. Take a look at the Effects panel and you'll see a button unique to the Effects panel: Live Preview. 

Click the Live Preview button and you will see an honest-to-goodness preview of any and all slide effects. Nice! But even better... Live Preview accurately previews slide animations and videos. Give it a shot and let me know how Live Preview works for you. I'm betting you'll kick Play this Slide to the curb like I did.

Note: You will need to add at least one effect to a slide object to use Live Preview. Without at least one effect, the Live Preview button is disabled.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Save and Share Effects

by Kevin Siegel  

I've written about Captivate's Effects feature in the past. If used appropriately, effects can greatly enhance your eLearning lesson.

During one of my recent Captivate 5/5.5 Essentials online classes, a participant asked if it was possible to share a group of effects with other members on her team. She had added several effects to an object that everyone on her team liked. They liked it so much they wanted her "recipe" to save them the trouble of finding all of the effects and setting the timing.

I told her that it was possible to export and then import effects from one project to another, and the process is surprisingly easy.

After applying two or more effects to an object, click theSave command at the bottom of the Effects panel. 

The effects will be saved as an XML file. You can save the file to any drive (if you're looking to share with your team, the network drive is likely your best bet).

Once you've saved the effects file, tell your team members that they can easily import the effect by right-clicking a slide object and choosing Apply Effect. 

Have them click the Add Effect button and click the Browse button.

 

The final step will be to find and open the saved effects file. Once opened, the saved effects will be applied to the selected object (in the same order you specified on the Effects panel when you saved the effects file).

Note: While I love the Effects feature, gratuitous use of effects can actually detract from your lesson... so please, developers... let's take it easy out there.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Template-Like Settings Without the Template

by Kevin Siegel  

During my advanced Captivate class, I spend a significant amount of time extolling the value of project templates. As a group, the class opens an existing project template, edits the template, uses the template to record a software simulation and then creates a project template from scratch.

I've written several articles about Captivate's project templates including how to convert a project into a project template and how to make the best use of template placeholders.

While templates are awesome and provide a great jump-start for a new Captivate project, you don't necessarily have to create a project template to ensure that many of the attributes within your projects are consistent.

Perhaps your biggest concern about new projects is ensuring that each new project has Text Captions that use specific fonts, font sizes and colors. Maybe you want to ensure that inserted objects (such as buttons) use a specific Object Style and play for a specific amount of time.

You can set several application attributes before you create a single project. Once set, each new project created on your computer will use those attributes. Setting these kinds of preferences in advance could save you a significant amount of time performing repetitive tasks.

To set application preferences, start Captivate. Ensure no projects are open and open the Preferences dialog box (Edit menu if you're using Windows; Adobe Captivate menu if you're using a Macintosh).

From the top left of the Preferences dialog box, choose Defaults.

On the Global Preferences screen, you'll find myriad options to explore. For instance, if you want most of your slides to play for 5 seconds, why not set it here (in the Slide Duration area) instead of changing the play time for each slide in an existing project?

 

When previewing a project, one of the options via File > Preview is Next 5 slides. Care to make it a lucky 7? No problem. Change the Preview Defaults to 7 slides and you'll be set in any new projects.

When inserting Text Captions into existing projects, each new caption will play for exactly 3 seconds. Want the captions all to play for 4.5 seconds in your next project? That's simple enough... select Text Caption from the Select drop-down menu and then change the Display For time to 4.5 seconds.

 

Finally, if you'd like to control the appearance of the Object Styles in each new project, simply choose Edit > Object Style Manager. As long as no projects are open when you work within the Object Style Manager, the changes you make and the attributes you set will affect every new project you create.

Alas, none of the pre-project settings I've discussed above will have any effect on existing projects. So if you're really against creating project tempates, I'd encourage you to spend some time setting up the Global Defaults and Object Styles sooner rather than later. 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Wacky Shapes Rule

by Kevin Siegel  

Captivate ships with a set number of Caption types. If you're a graphic designer (or know someone who is), you can always create more Caption types. However, the process of creating a custom Caption type can be a bit tedious.

As an alternative, you'll be happy to learn that you can get as wacky as you want when it comes to Text Captions, and you don't have to go to the trouble of creating a Caption type.

To begin, use the Object Toolbar to insert a Polygon, Circle or Rectangle on a slide. (To draw a Polygon, select the tool and click once each time you want to add a section. When finished, click at the beginning, or double-click, to close the shape.) 

 

Once you've drawn the shape, choose Edit > Add Text. You'll notice that there's an insertion point within the shape. At this point, you can add text just like you can within a Text Caption. And you can use the Properties panel to format the text as necessary.

If you've drawn a Polygon shape and you're unhappy with the shape, simply choose Edit > Edit Points. You'll then be able to reshape the Polygon in all sorts of wacky ways.

 

Note: The only shape that will not accept text is a Line.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate 5/5.5: Join Objects in a Snap

by Kevin Siegel  

If you've ever tried to draw a line between two objects (so you could join them to show a relationship between one object and the next), you'll appreciate Captivate's Snap to Object feature.

In the image below, I've drawn two simple shapes on a Captivate slide. Next, I'd like to draw a diagonal line between the two boxes. 

 

In the image below, I've drawn the line using Captivate's Line tool. However, I wasn't quite perfect when I released my mouse and the line ended up being a bit too long. Certainly it would be easy enough resize the line at this point, but I'd like to be a bit more efficient and end up with a perfect object-to-object line the first time. That's where the Snap to Object option will come into play.

 

Since the Snap to Object feature will only work on new objects as they are being drawn, not on objects that are already on the slide, the first thing I did was delete the original line. Then I chose View > Snap to Object.

Using the Line tool, I drew a new line, starting at the first object and moving diagonally toward the upper left of the second object. This time, as I got close to the second object, a circle appeared over the corner of the second object. (This is a visual indicator telling me that Captivate was ready to snap to the second object.) 

 

All that I needed to do at this point was click my mouse and I had a perfect line between the two objects.

 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).

Adobe Captivate: Apply Your Changes

by Kevin Siegel  

Over the past several months I've written myriad articles extolling the value of using styles on slide objects (including how to reset them, clone them and how to create styles on the fly).

Have you been a good developer? Are you using Object Styles? I'm going to give each and every one of you the benefit of the doubt... of course you are. But even if you are the most disciplined user of styles, there could be trouble ahead. Since several object properties are not contained within an Object Style, keeping things consistent can still prove challenging... even if you fully utilize styles. 

Let's take just one group on the Properties panel as an example. The Transform group (Captivate 5.5) or Position and Size group (Captivate 5) contains options that will not be found in the Object Style Manager when you create or edit a style.

What would happen if you manually used a non-style option on a selected slide object? Here's a scenario: let's say that you want to change the width of a single text caption. That's simple enough to accomplish via the Properties panel (using the Transform/Position and Size group). After changing the width of the caption, you then decide that you want all of the text captions in your project to use the new width. Since the width option isn't something that's part of an Object Style, you'll need to go from slide to slide and manually change the width of every caption. Not very efficient, eh?

Read on...

After manually changing the width of the text caption, ensure the caption is selected and then, go to the Properties panel and on the far right of the group, click the Apply to all button. 

You will see two choices in the drop-down menu: Apply to all items of this type and Apply to all items of same style. If you choose the former, all text captions in the project will get the new width. Nice! If you choose the latter, only the text captions using the same style as the selected text caption will update. This is a nice option if you only want to change the width of a specific group of captions. 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).