During my advanced Adobe Captivate class, I stress the value in doing things faster and more efficiently within Captivate. Take formatting objects as an example. In the image below, there are several text captions positioned on a slide. The formatting of the captions is something less than consistent.
In the spirit of consistency, I'd like all of the captions in the image above to look the same. To get there, I'm going to apply the same object style on every object. As I select the captions, I discover, much to my horror, that the developer who gave me the project did not use five different object styles to format the captions as I had assumed. Instead, the developer selected each caption, one at a time, and then manually formatted each one using the formatting tools on the Properties panel. (You can easily determine that a style was overridden by selecting an object and, on the Properties panel, observing the plus sign to the left of the style's name.)
Because the captions on the slide have been manually formatted (and the Default Caption Style overridden), my mission to ensure object consistency has now been muddied. Before I can apply a consistent look to the slide objects, I first have to reset the style back to the Default Caption Style. That's a simple job–all I'll need to do is select a modified text caption and, on the Properties panel, Style area, click the Reset Style tool (shown below).
The selected text caption will revert to the style assigned to the caption, without any modifications. The problem is that I'll need to repeat these steps for every modified object. If a project has a significant number of objects with modifications, this would take a fair amount of time rendering the process inefficient.
There is a better, more efficient way…
On the Properties panel, Style area, select Replace modified styles (this option is deselected by default).
Select a slide caption that contains the formatting you would like to use project-wide. On the Properties panel, Style group, click the Save changes to Existing Style tool.
You'll be prompted to confirm the action by clicking the OK button.
Every modified caption will be reset and will now follow the formatting of the saved style. (Compare the image below with the first image above and you'll see that all of the text captions have taken on the appearance of the selected object.)
If you would like to see a demonstration of replacing modified styles across multiple slides, check out the video I created on the IconLogic YouTube channel.
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