by Kevin Siegel 
Adobe recently announced a patch for Adobe Captivate 7. The patch offers support for the new Macintosh and Windows operating systems and fixes several bugs. As patches go, bug fixes and expanded support for operating systems is typical fare. However, if you've spent the few minutes that it takes to install the free upgrade, you might have missed some enhancements that are a pleasant surprise (and above and beyond what one might expect to find in a simple patch).
For instance, the ability to lock slide objects has been around for years. All you needed to do was select a slide object and, on the Timeline, click the white dot in the lock column. In the image below, I've added a Text Caption to a slide. The white dot indicates that the object is not locked. I can drag the unlocked object around the slide, resize it, and use any of the groups on the Properties panel.
Prior to the patch for Captivate 7, clicking the white dot simply locked the object and the white dot changed into a lock icon (shown in the image below). While locked, you couldn't move or resize the object nor change any of the object's Properties without first unlocking the object.
After installing the Captivate 7.01 patch, there are now two lock modes: fully locked and semi-locked. After an initial click on the white dot, the lock icon is noticeably different from what was seen in older versions of Captivate. In the image below, notice that instead of the standard lock icon that was shown in the image above, the lock icon now includes arrows.
The arrows not only appear on the lock icon on the Timeline; the locked object on the slide also displays the semi-locked icon (shown below).
When an object is semi-locked, you cannot change its size or slide position. However, you can make other changes to the object. For instance, in the image below, notice that while the Transform group options aren't available, the options in the General group (Caption and Callout) are both available. In addition to the General group, all of the remaining groups remain available with a semi-locked object.
If you'd like to fully lock an object (just like in the old days), it's a simple matter of clicking the white dot on the Timeline a second time (the first click semi-locks the object; a second click fully locks the object).
If you'd like to see a demonstration of how the new lock feature works in Adobe Captivate 7.01, check out this video on the IconLogic YouTube channel.
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Looking for training on Adobe Captivate? IconLogic offers multiple live, online Adobe Captivate classes each month including Introduction to Adobe Captivate and Advanced Adobe Captivate.