Month: November 2011

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PowerPoint 2010: Creating a Spinning Animation, Version 2.0

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

After posting the first article, PowerPoint 2010: Creating a Spinning Animation, I got a tip from one of our readers, Konrad Schroth, for an alternate way to create a spinning animation. Today I'd like to share his method.

The previous method I shared involved duplicating the object you would like to spin, making it invisible, lining it up as a mirror image to the original image and then grouping the two images. This method shifts the center axis to the tip of the original image and changes the axis from which the image spins.

Here is an alternate way to achieve the same effect:

  1. Locate the point upon which you would like the image to spin.

    By default, the image will spin upon its center axis, as depicted below.

    By default, the image will spin upon its center axis.

  2. Once you have determined the axis point, drag the Guides so they intersect at this point. (To view the guides, choose View > Show > Guides.)

    In this example, I have the guides intersecting in the center of the base of this clock hand.

    Drag the Guides so they intersect

  3. Insert a circle (Insert > Shapes), large enough that it completely overlaps the shape you would like to rotate when it is centered on the axis point you have established.

    Note: To insert a circle, select the Oval shape and hold down the [Shift] key while drawing. In order to see my clock hand image in front of the circle, I have sent the circle shape to the back by selecting Home > Drawing > Arrange > Send to Back.

    Large circle added.

  4. Group the image to the circle by holding down the [Shift] key and selecting both, followed by pressing [Ctrl] [G] on your keyboard.
  5. From within the group, select only the circle, right-click and select Format Shape.
  6. From the Fill category, select No Fill.
  7. From the Line category, select No Line.

    The circle will now be invisible.

  8. Apply the Spin animation to the group (Animations > Add Animation > Emphasis > Spin).

    The image (the clock hand in this case) will now rotate from the axis you specified by centering the invisible circle on it.

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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Adobe Captivate: Set a Master Movie

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

Last week I showed you how to remove the TOC from an Aggregated Captivate course. One reason that people elect to hide the TOC is that the TOC simply takes up too much space on the learner's screen.

One way to get around the space issue when it comes to the TOC is to create an overlay. Simply put, the overlay feature will keep the TOC hidden until the learner elects to expand (or show) it by clicking a button. If you've never used Captivate's Overlay feature, check out the TOC overlay article I wrote earlier this year.

While overlays are often desirable in a Captivate-published eLearning course, you may be surprised (bummed even) to learn that the feature simply does not exist within the Aggregator application. What's a developer to do?

  1. Create an overlay TOC in at least one of the lessons you plan to add to the aggregated course.
  2. Publish all of the Captivate lessons as SWFs.
  3. Add the published modules (SWFs) to the Aggregator project. (Note: Only SWFs can be aggregated.)

And now for a bit of magic…

  1. Select the module that contained the overlay TOC.
  2. From the top left of the Aggregator application window, select Set as Master Movie.

    Master Movie

    By setting the overlay TOC module as the Master Movie, the published Aggregator project will use the Skin (TOC overlay settings included) from the module. Nice!

  3. Publish the Aggregator project and you'll see that the TOC is hidden until the learner elects to click the TOC button on the playbar.
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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5 or 5.5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.
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Adobe FrameMaker: The Page Count Variable for Books (Part I)

FrameMaker's Page Count variable makes it easy to track (and reference) the page count of a single chapter. The Page Count variable, which ships with FrameMaker, makes it possible to set up page numbers that look like this: 1 of 10, 2 of 10, 3 of 10, etc. Here's how:

  1. Choose View > Master Pages.
  2. Click within the header or footer frame.
  3. Choose Special > Variable to open the Variables pod.
  4. Add the Current Page # variable (double click to insert, or click once on the name, and click the Insert button on the Variables pod toolbar).

    Page Count and Current Page # variables.

     

  5. Press the [spacebar], type the word of and press [spacebar] again.
  6. Finish by inserting the Page Count variable and return to the body pages. 

The Page Count variable works by inserting a reference to the last body page of the chapter. As you add and remove pages via editing, the variable updates.

Easy enough. But what about trying to keep track of the last page of a multi-chapter book? Tune in next week to learn more about that.

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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.

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Looking to learn Adobe FrameMaker We offer Beginner and Advanced classes.

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Adobe and the “Creative Cloud”

According to Adobe's chief technical officer Kevin Lynch, Adobe is in the midst of a "fundamental transformation from the world of software in boxes to the world of the cloud, touch interfaces on devices, and social connections."

"Creative Cloud is important to Adobe as it represents the next generation of how we see creative software being acquired and used, blending services in the cloud with creative apps on devices and PCs, along with connecting the creative community," said Lynch.

You can learn more about the Creative Cloud here.

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Adobe Captivate: Aggregated? Go TOC-Less

by Kevin Siegel Follow us on Twitter View our profile on LinkedIn

I covered the process of using Captivate's Aggregator utility some time ago. The Aggregator offers a quick way to combine multiple published SWFs into one, seamless lesson.

Once the lessons are aggregated, they will share a single TOC, allowing learners to jump from one lesson to another at will. During a recent advanced Captivate class, one of my students asked if it was possible to remove the TOC. He said that he wanted the lessons to play one after the other, and he did not want learners to be able to skip over any of the lessons. While my preference is to allow a learner to skip around a lesson as they see fit (see AJ's article), the ability to hide the TOC in an aggregated project is simple. From within the Aggregator project, click the Publish Settings command (located at the top of the Aggregator window).

From within the Aggregator Preferences dialog box, select Hide Table of Contents and then click the OK button.

There will not be any obvious changes to the Aggregator project at this point. However, when you publish the project the shared TOC will be removed and the combined lessons will play one after the other.

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Looking to learn Adobe Captivate 5 or 5.5? We offer Beginner and Advanced classes. Both Windows and Macintosh developers can attend these classes.

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eLearning: Let the Learner Decide the Path

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." — Albert Einstein

After attending Edward Tufte's seminar (that I wrote about last week), it got me thinking about being authoritarian with an audience. Tufte admonished the use of the "slow reveal" in PowerPoint presentations, suggesting instead that if you must use bullet points (he advises against using them altogether), present all your information–clearly and at once. I don't think this applies just to giving a presentation, but also to eLearning.

Have you noticed that a lot of eLearning constricts the navigation to prevent skipping slides? In theory I understand this. You want your audience to take in all of the information. Not only is it important information, but dag nabbit, you spent the time to put it there, why should they get to just skip over it? From an eLearning developer's point of view this makes total sense.

However, from a learner's point of view, it can be restrictive. Maybe your learner already knows this information. Maybe he would like to explore the lesson in an order than makes more sense to him. Maybe she reads faster than your slide thinks she does.

When I looked into it, I realized I was not the first person in the community to suggest freeing up the navigation, so rather than reiterate what others have said, I have instead gathered some of my favorite posts on eLearning navigation.

Visual Menus: Structure with Style

 

No Next Button: Some Examples

 

Curiosity Might Have Killed the Cat, But Learners Love It

 

Here's Why Unlocking Your Course Navigation Will Create Better Learning

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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eLearning: Tips for Better Data Representation

by AJ George Follow us on Twitter

I recently attended an Edward Tufte course on "Presenting Data and Information." If you are unsure of who Edward Tufte is, I would suggest checking out his Wikipedia page.

Here are some of the top tips I took away from the course:

Stop Assuming Your Audience is Dumb

Have you noticed that PowerPoint presentations and eLearning modules will often do the "slow reveal," only showing one bullet point at a time? Why do we do that? Do we think that our audience cannot handle all the information at once? That their poor, feeble brains will explode if the words appear before we say them?

Tufte advised to do away with the slow reveal, citing that using it makes you a bit "authoritarian." Let your audience decide what they need and want to read, and when.

Tufte pointed out that readers of George A. Miller's "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," who deduced that only seven items belong on lists or slides, must have mis-read the paper. Tufte said that the correct number of items that belong in a list is zero. He felt that the real point of Miller's paper, among other things, was to suggest ways to place unlike data into context so as to make them easier for an audience to remember and understand. Perhaps one way to do away with the slow reveal would be to do away with the bullets you wish to reveal.

Think More Logically About Data Placement

Related to assuming your audience is dumb, do you really need to break up information into five different graphs on different PowerPoint slides? Could the information be compiled into one well-designed chart or graph instead? In Tufte's Beautiful Evidence he presents a clear and concise chart on cancer survival rates and then goes on to show how convoluted the evidence becomes when broken into many charts in PowerPoint, full of what he refers to as "chartjunk." You can see the example for yourself here in Tufte's online forum.

Additionally Tufte pointed out the seemingly obvious (but often overlooked) idea to provide data side by side for comparisons as well as placing important things adjacent in space. Don't make your audience leaf through pages or wait for a new slide to see the information as it relates to other relevant information. Put it all out there–together and at once.

Streamline Design

While Tufte advocated providing more (in fact, as much as possible) information in our data representation, he was clear that he did not mean more stuff, ie "chartjunk."

Things that can be removed:

  • Drop shadows. (I know, this one hurts; I like drop shadows too.)
  • Boxes around information. (He gave the example that tobacco companies are forced to add Surgeon General warnings to their products. They slap them on there in all caps with a big box on it. Do you think it's a coincidence that this doesn't improve the readability at all?)
  • Linking lines without annotation. (Check out this link for more on this). Particularly pay attention to the graphic from Page 14 in his book for a good example of how linking lines can be annotated to give the chart more meaning. There is also a good example of eliminating boxes around information right below that on the page.)


Make the Information Your Interface

According to Tufte, "The best design can do is get out of the way." He suggested making the information the interface and was very happy to see gadgets with touch interfaces take off, eliminating the use of a mouse and the clutter of scroll bars.

For your viewing pleasure, check out this presentation Tufte made to Apple on where the iPhone's interface was strong and where it could use some work. And then, head over to Engadget to check out this post on a concept phone by Nokia. While still just a concept, the idea that this is the future of design and making the information the interface is pretty exciting.

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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Communicator and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."

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Convert Captivate Quizzes to HTML5 Format

In September, Adobe made the HTML5 Converter for Adobe Captivate available on Adobe Labs.

According to Adobe, "With HTML5 Converter, you can easily convert Adobe Captivate generated SWF to HTML5 format and repurpose your countless hours of interactive trainings for mobile devices that do not support Flash content."

Adobe said "We received a lot of positive feedback from customers who were looking for an HTML5 solution and tons of requests for supporting more objects and functionalities, from which quiz and LMS support topped the charts."

You'll be happy to learn that a second version of the HTML5 converter is available and it supports the three main question types: Multiple Choice, True/False and HotSpot. Learn more here.