Adobe Captivate: Emailing Quiz Results

by Lori Smith

Have some of you long-time Captivate developers been wondering what happened to the ability to put a "Send Email" link on your quiz results page? If you were using Captivate 5.5 or earlier, this used to be an option. With Captivate 6 & 7, the Quizzing capability has been enhanced and some things have been changed. Emailing from the results page is one of them. You no longer set this from the Quiz Preferences > Reporting category.

While at first glance it appears that the ability to email quiz results data has been removed, you actually have more options. In fact, I am going to teach you two ways that you can email the quiz results.

The first and simplest way to email quiz results is to choose Quiz > Quiz Preferences > Quiz > Pass or Fail.

From the two Action drop-down menus, select Send email to.

Once the quiz is completed by the learner and they click the Continue button on the Quiz Results slide, their email client will open just as it did in earlier versions of Captivate. If the Quiz Results slide is not used, the email client will open after submission of the last answer.

Note: Although an email opens and is addressed as specified in the Quiz Settings, the subject field is blank and the content is now blank. The learner will have to fill in both areas as necessary.

A second way to send quiz results via email is by using an email widget. While this method provides a little more information in the resulting email, it's a bit more complicated to set up than the first method.

Go to the Quiz Results slide (or the slide you would like the learner to initiate the email). Open the Widget panel (Window menu) and Insert the emailIcon widget.

Fill in the options for the widget. Something like this would make sense:

Name the widget PassEmailWidget by selecting it on the slide and using the Name field on the Properties panel. Also deselect Visible in output so that the widget will initially beinvisible in the output.

Insert the widget again, this time naming it FailedEmailIcon (deselect Visible in output).

All you need to do now is create a little Advanced Action namedShowEmailIcon that looks like this (Project > Advanced Actions):

Lastly, invoke the ShowEmailIcon action on entry to the Quiz Results slide (or whatever slide you have chosen). Select the slide on the Filmstrip and, on the properties panel, set the Action group like this:

Bam! Now the email client will open when the learner clicks the eMail icon, and at least the subject line will be filled in as you like it. Seem like a lot of work? Only the first time around. After that, save this action and these widgets in a template and reuse them on future projects.

Do you have other quizzing conundrums or wishes? Send them to me! We are also thinking about creating a one-day online class dedicated to quizzing with Adobe Captivate. I'd love to hear if there's interest out there.