Questions of the Week

Question About Captivate Project Size

I’ve been told by my IT team at work that a Captivate project shouldn’t be larger than 60 slides. What’s the problem with larger projects? And just how many slides makes a project large?

Answer

Actually, a 60 slide project isn’t a problem. I start to worry about project size when you get over 100 slides, and even then, only projects in excess of 150 slides would really get my attention.

We recently produced a lesson for a client that ended up containing more than 200 slides–which is HUGE. While the project contained more than 200 slides, Captivate performed perfectly. The only thing we noticed, performance-wise, was that it took more time than usual to open, save and publish the project.

If a project is large, it will take you longer to produce. We ended up spending more than 20 hours to produce the 200-slide lesson I mentioned earlier instead of the typical 10 hours.  In addition to a longer production cycle, it’s going to take longer for the published lesson to download off of the Web. And it will likely take too long for a user to complete. I recommend that you create lessons (projects) that can be completed by your users in 5 minutes or less. You can have several lessons, each part of a bigger course.

Keep in mind that larger projects throw your production cycle out of whack since it is very hard to budget for a massive project. Instead, it’s easier to budget if you keep the size of your project reasonable (under 100 slides). In the article about Captivate production time in this very newsletter, you will see that I recommend you budget 10 hours to produce a five-minute lesson (which should be under said 100 slides).

Question About Linking One Captivate Project to Another

I’ve linked one Captivate project together via a button. The way it’s supposed to work is that when a user clicks the button, another project is supposed to open. When I test the button in the published movie, I get an error message that says the file I’m trying to link to cannot be found. Any ideas?

Answer

I suspect that the reason your link to other project is not working is because each of the published project files are in their own folders. Place all of the published files in one large folder on your server and the links should work (assuming you have published all of the linked projects).

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