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In a hurry?  Recommendation   

Earlier, I said that one of the things I wanted to test with the new version was producing templates that I could use for a variety of purposes. Project templates let you design a consistent look and feel to be used across Captivate projects.

They can also save time because you are reusing preferences and elements. This way you can build each template once, and then the next time you start a new Captivate project, you can select an existing template.

Start screen choices

On the Captivate start screen, you can chose to create a template, or if you have a template you want to use, you can create a project that uses an existing template, as shown above.

Project template

The graphic above shows a template I created for some of my company's Captivate projects. The screenshot shows templates for the first slide, a topic introduction slide, a text and graphic slide, an animation slide, a video slide, and a topic recap slide. By producing the template slides, I can better assure consistency across different projects that will use the same template.

Placeholders in template

Templates include placeholders for different types of screen elements. For example, the screenshot above shows the template for the text and graphic slide. You can set properties for each type of slide and for elements on the slide, such as animation or video. For example, the placeholder for video lets you set options such as the width and height, timing, and transitions.

Building and using templates have another advantage. You can create a project using a template and send that project to others on the team so they can populate appropriate placeholders.

Captivate formatted template

I should note that Captivate provides some existing templates that you can use or edit so even if you don't want to create your own, you can adopt or adapt existing templates. The graphic above shows the preformatted Business_790x545 template.

BUILDING A SOFTWARE DEMO
One of the things Captivate is best at, based on my experience with previous versions, is building simple to more complex application demos and simulations. Let me define what I mean by demos and simulations. Demos show how an application works and simulations let learners interact with the simulated application. Both have been quite easy to produce in previous versions of Captivate.

I built a demo showing how to change your monitor's display resolution prior to capturing screen activity in Captivate. But before I started capturing screen activity, I actually did need to change my monitor display resolution! I have a very large monitor with a screen resolution of 1900x1200 pixels.

If I use that resolution when capturing screen activity, those watching the published demo with a lower screen resolution might have to scroll to see the whole demo. Not a good plan. So I changed my screen resolution to 1024x768 pixels before capturing to greatly reduce the chances that viewers will need to scroll.

Change in screen resolution

The screenshot above shows the resulting slides from capturing a change of screen resolution in the Display Properties dialog box.

After previewing what I captured (by clicking on the F12 button), I saw some timing and slide transition issues I needed to deal with. I wanted the slides to display a little longer and to have no transitions between slides. To make these changes, I double-clicked on one slide and edited the slide properties (by right clicking the slide and selecting Properties).

Adjusting properties

I then changed the display time and changed the transition to No Transition, as shown above. I also checked the Apply to All checkbox because I wanted these changes to be applied to each slide.

After building the demo, I tried to add in three slides--the title slide, the introduction slide, and the recap slide--from the template I created earlier. When I opened the template and copied those three slides from there to my demo, the slides I brought in were cropped.

Huh? I was frustrated and spent a long time trying to figure out how to make this work. I got increasingly frustrated.

I'm telling you about my frustrating attempts to add those three slides so you know that even when you are experienced with authoring tools, you can do dumb things that take up a lot of time. So don't feel bad when this happens to you. To some extent, figuring out how to do what you want and making mistakes along the way is just part of the process. The more you mess up, the more you learn. My motto.

My problem was due to OE and was in no way the fault of the tool. (OE means operator error.) My problem: The template slides were created in an 800x600 pixel format. The demo was the size of the Display Properties dialog box, which isn't 800x600 pixels. So when I copied slides from one size to another, the incoming slides got cropped to fit the size of the demo. Duh.

Reformatted demo

The lesson here is that if you want to mix slide types, do some planning. I should have started with the 800x600 template and created the demo inside that format. I redid the demo in that format, and you can see above that my demo project now includes the two beginning slides and one ending slide from my template. And my demo now appears in an 800x600 window (because all slides need to be the same size). Phew.

One of the handiest features in Captivate, in my opinion, is automatic text captions that are created when recording screen action. Captivate automatically builds text captions describing your actions, as shown in the graphic above (the white box with blue type).

So, for example, if you are selecting an item in a menu, Captivate can automatically build the caption that says, "From the Laugh menu, select Chuckle." After the text captions are automatically created, you can edit the text or change the formatting. This feature can be a huge time saver. And you can always add additional text captions manually, as needed.

Recommendation
See Part 5.

Part 1: Game Changer | Part 2: Getting Started | Part 3: Developing Templates | Part 4: New Features | Part 5: Final Thoughts

CAPTIVATE, PART 3 Rating