by Kevin Siegel 
Take a look at the Insert menu in Adobe Captivate 5 and you'll see two similar commands: New Slide and Blank Slide.
Spend a few minutes selecting either menu item and you might find yourself at a loss to explain the difference between the two. In fact, it will likely appear that New Slide and Blank Slide both result in a new, blank slide. So the natural assumption would be that Adobe goofed when adding the menu items and one or the other should have been removed during the beta process.
Not so fast…
There is a difference between the two menu items. If you've created a Master Slide and used the Master Slide on a slide on the Filmstrip, inserting a New Slide will ensure that the new slide also uses the Master Slide. It may not seem like such a big deal, but now you won't have to take the additional step of assigning the Master Slide to the new slide. Nice!
Of course, if you didn't want to use the Master Slide, a trip to the Properties panel would be in order (that's where you can assign Master Slides to Filmstrip slides). Not so nice! No worries, when inserting a new slide, choose the Blank Slide menu item instead and your new slide will be blank.