Adobe Captivate & Articulate Storyline: Round-Tripping With Microsoft Word

by Kevin Siegel   

How do you collaborate with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who aren't Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline developers? Specifically I'm talking about text content. How many times have you gone back and forth (and back and forth again) with your SMEs, changing a word on a slide here, removing a comma there. Maddening, right?

Wouldn't it be great if you could export the text from your eLearning projects into Word, get your SMEs to make their changes in the document (using Word), and then import those changes back into your project? That kind of workflow is a dream, right? Nope. The workflow exists today in both Captivate and Storyline and the process is simple.

Adobe Captivate

Open or create a Captivate project and choose File > Import/Export > Export project captions and closed captions.

In the Open dialog box, name the resulting document, specify a save destination, and click the Save button. (You will be notified when the captions have been exported.)

Click Yes to open the document in Word.

The captions will appear in a Word table. There will be five columns: Slide ID, Item ID, Original Text Caption Data, Updated Text Caption Data, and Slide. You can make any changes you want to the Updated Text Caption Data, but you should not change any of the other information. The Slide ID identifies which slide your edited captions go to. The Item ID identifies which caption goes with which caption data.

 

Make your editorial changes; then save and close the Word document.

The final step is to to import the edited text back into Captivate. Choose File > Import/Export > Import project captions and closed captions. Find and open the document you edited in Word. A dialog box will appear confirming the number of captions that were imported. Not only will the edited content be imported, but formatting changes made to the Word document, such as making text bold or italic, are also retained.

 

Articulate Storyline

 

The process of round-tripping between Articulate Storyline and Microsoft Word is just about the same as it is in Adobe Captivate.

Open or create a Storyline project and then choose File > Translation > Export. In the Open dialog box, name the resulting document, specify a save destination, and click the Save button.

 

In the resulting Word document, SMEs can make any needed content changes in the Translate this column area of the document and then return the edited document to you.

 

The final step is to simply choose File > Translation > Import and open the edited Word document.

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If you'd like to learn more about eLearning, come hang out in my next eLearning basics mini course. And if you'd like to learn more Captivate, Presenter, or Storyline, we've got a great collection of live, online classes for you.