I recently heard a couple of Captivate developers complaining about how hard it was to work with long Captivate captions because of all the scrolling up and down it takes to read through them via the caption properties dialog box.
Suddenly, and without much warning, I was dragged into the debate. They asked me if there was an easier way to work with captions in Captivate. When I suggested that short captions were better than long captions, which would end the debate, I was greeted with something less than enthusiasm. “No,” I was told, the caption length had been dictated by the client and the length could not be changed. Besides, if the caption was short, but the font size large, you’d still have to scroll up and/or down to edit the text. Hmmmm.
When I suggested that it was a good practice to export the captions into Word and work with them there (performing a round-trip back to Word if edits were necessary), I was greeted with: “That’s all well and good, but wouldn’t it be nice if it was easier to work with the captions while in Captivate.”
One of my developers, Anne Nolan, offers up the following cool trick that she had found accidentally while working inside a Captivate caption.
I’ll admit right now that while I consider myself something of an authority on Captivate, I had no idea Captivate could do Ms. Nolan’s trick. It just goes to show that if you think you know it all, the Ms. Nolan’s of the world will be happy to put you in your place. Well done, Ms. Nolan. (Note: You’ll need a mouse with a scroll wheel to try this trick at home.)
- Double-click a caption to show its properties
- Left-click inside the caption
- While keeping the left clicker pressed, scroll using the scroll wheel on your mouse
You’re not seeing things. If you keep the left clicker down and roll the scroll wheel up an down, you’ll see the caption text zooming in and out. How cool is that?
Do you have any Captivate tricks up your sleeve? Please share. I’m happy to give you full credit right here.