ADOBE CAPTIVATE: Hide & Show the Playbar at Will

by Kevin Siegel, COTP

I recently received an email from a fellow Captivate developer. She was hoping there was an elegant way to hide the playbar on specific slides.

Certainly you can use the Skin Editor to remove the playbar completely from a project. Alternatively, if you don't want the playbar to be available during a quiz, there are Quiz Preferences for that.

This particular project did not contain a quiz and while the developer wanted the playbar to be available in most instances, there were a few slides where she simply didn't want the playbar.

The process for hiding the playbar on select slides is very simple. First, keep in mind that the playbar is visible by default unless you tell it to go away. But how? To hide the playbar on the fly, select a slide on the Filmstrip. Then, on the Properties Inspector, Actions tab, On Enter drop-down menu, choose Assign. From the Assign drop-down menu, choose the variable named cpCmndShowPlaybar. (The variable comes with Captivate and will always be available in the Assign drop-down men.) Lastly, type 0 into the With field. (The zero is the same as telling Captivate not to do something… or false… or no… in this instance, it's telling Captivate that you don't want the playbar.)

Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic. Following a career in Public Affairs with the US Coast Guard and in private industry, Kevin has spent decades as a technical communicator, classroom and online trainer, public speaker, and has written hundreds of computer training books for adult learners. He has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide.