I've heard of a disturbing problem from several Captivate developers: changes made to some projects are magically undone after the project is reopened. Huh?
Let me explain further… I received an email from a Captivate developer. The previous Friday he had deleted a few slides from a project, made some editorial changes to a few text captions and saved his work. He distinctly remembered backing up the project to the server, and overwriting the backup on the server before he left for the weekend. All was right with the world.
When he opened the project Monday morning, he was horrified to see that the changes he had made were gone. He was convinced that the IT staff had somehow rolled his computer back to a previous date. They placed the blame on him–of course. And back and forth it went, with no resolution.
I worked with the developer a bit and discovered the problem. It turns out that the IT department was innocent. In fact, the developer had inadvertently been working on the backup project that Friday. After saving and closing, he had dragged the project file located on his hard drive to the server… and replaced the old file with the new. Mind you, this particular developer was very computer savvy. How could this have happened? Read on…
When you start Captivate, recently used projects appears in the Open a recent project list at the left of the screen. You can open projects quickly by clicking the file name from the list.
But be careful… prior to opening the project, pay attention to the path name that appears in the lower left of the screen. In the image below, a project file (LMS_Me.cp) is located on the C drive.
What I discovered when working with the developer mentioned earlier was that he had inadvertently opened the project from the server. He admitted that he had selected File > Open earlier in the day and browsed to the network drive. He quickly realized he had opened the project from the network drive (he only uses the network drive to backup his projects) and closed the project. No harm… no foul.
But then the wheels came off his cart. At some point, he clicked the project's file name in the Open a recent project list and the project stored on the network opened. Not realizing he had once again opened the backup, he made changes to the project, saved and closed. Later that day, when attempting to backup the project, he actually dragged the old project onto the server. To compound the problem, he agreed to replace the new project with the old one when prompted via an alert dialog box. Ouch! (In his defense, the poor guy said that it was Friday… and he was looking forward to the weekend.)
So how can you prevent this from happening to you? As I mentioned above, you should pay close attention to the project's path name prior to opening. In addition, if the wrong version of the project is appearing in the Open a recent project list, you can remove it from the list in two ways: hiding or deleting. Both options, shown, below, can be displayed via a right-click on the project name. But be careful–neither selection can be undone. If you choose to Hide Project, the project is simply removed from the list, but is not deleted from the drive. However, if you choose the Delete Project option, the project will literally be removed from the drive.
Do you have a Captivate production problem that's making you pull your hair out? Email your problem and let others learn solutions from your experience.