Category: Captivate

How many times have you wanted to make Captivate slide objects animate like you can do in PowerPoint (you know, make an image fly in, flip, rotate, follow a path… the standard stuff you've been able to do since the dawn of time in PowerPoint)? And how many times have you been stymied when it comes to adding effects because well, Captivate simply did not offer the feature. Did you notice I said did not? That's right, the new Adobe Captivate 5 offers effects… and not just a few vanilla effects. Captivate 5 features so many effects, we just might have to offer a dedicated class just to cover them all.

Add an Effect

During the steps that follow, I'll show you how to add a few simple Effects to an image (but keep in mind that you can add an Effect to just about any slide object and you can combine Effects).

1. Right-click the image and choose Apply Effect.
2. On the Effects tab, which is new to Adobe Captivate 5 and is grouped by default with the Timeline, click the Add Effect button (the button is very small and is located in the lower-left of the Effects panel).

   

   Shown below is the full Effects menu available to you in Adobe Captivate 5. Each menu has several effects.

   

3. In the screen capture below, notice that I've added an image and positioned it at the far left of the slide. Then I selected Entrance > Fly In > Fly In From Right.

   The slide position of the image is important. As the image performs the Effect, the image will fly in from the far right of the slide and stop at the designated slide position.

   

4. When you add Effects, the effect appears on the Effects panel (as mentioned above, the Effects panel is new in Adobe Captivate 5 and grouped with the Timeline). In the screen capture below, notice that I have also added a Glow effect.

   

   You can easily control which effect occurs first (in the screen capture above, the Fly In From Right effect will occur first, followed by the Glow effect). All you will need to do to reverse the effect is drag the objects left or right on the Effects panel (just like controlling the timing of objects on the Captivate Timeline).

   Two final things, but I think they are both kind of cool. First, many of the Effects will have Properties you can edit. In the screen capture above, the Glow Effects include Blur and Strength properties. Second, there is a Save icon (the little disk) on the Effects panel that will allow you to save your Effects for future use.

I've been using, writing about and teaching Captivate since, well… before the program was known as Captivate. I've seen all of the upgrades. I've been underwhelmed (Captivate 1 to 2 didn't do much for me) and amazed (Captivate 3 to 4 was a major step forward for the program). With the upgrade from Captivate 4 to 5, I'm awestruck. Adobe didn't just upgrade the program, they tore it down and rebuilt it.

If you're on Twitter or follow the eLearning BLOGS, then you probably already know that the new version of Captivate is expected to be released in June of this year (as in next month). The new version will run on a Macintosh, which would be reason enough to do a jig except that that is not even the coolest of all the enhancements. Over the coming weeks, I'll touch on some of the hottest features that will surely bring a smile to your face (and have you reaching for your credit card in a rush to buy the upgrade).

Goodbye windowshades, hello panels!

The new Captivate has a shiny new interface that more closely matches the other popular Adobe programs. Gone are the dreaded windowshade buttons that were made popular by the late, great Macromedia. (Those of you who don't know the history might be surprised to learn that Captivate was once owned by Macromedia before Macromedia got swallowed up by Adobe.)

I can't tell you how many new developers (and even some vets) clicked the windowshade button for the Timeline to collapse the panel, only to find themselves in a fight with Captivate trying to get the pesky panel to come back. In Captivate 5, so long windowshades, hello panels.

You won't find very many dialog boxes in Captivate 5. The new version relies on panels for just about everything. For instance, in the current version of Captivate, if you right-click an object and choose Properties, you are met with the Properties dialog box. Make your changes there and then click OK. In the new Captivate, you double-click an object to display the Properties panel. Once on the panel, you make your changes and… and… there's no OK button to click. Simply continue working because your settings took. Not having to click an OK button after every change is going to take some getting used to, but just think of all the clicks you are going to save over the coming years!

Workspaces

So there's all these new panels and you are going to love them. I mean hate them. I mean love them. To be honest, you're going to have to get used to the new panels. You'll probably hate them at first but grow to love them. Believe me, the panels are worlds better than the clunky old dialog boxes.

To help you get used to the new panels, Captivate 5 sports a Workspaces feature. Here's how it works… drag your panels anywhere you want within the Captivate window. Group your favorite panels together, collapse them, resize them or close them.

When you've got Captivate window looking the way you want, why take the chance that some rogue colleague of yours is going to start Captivate after you've left for the day and move everything around? Instead, go to the Workspace menu and choose New Workspace.

Name your new workspace and click the OK button (yes, I said click OK… most of the dialog boxes are gone, but not all of them).

Once saved, you can access your new workspace via the Workspace menu where you will find a half dozen default Workspaces including Classic, Widget and Skin Editor. It is worth noting that you can delete or rename a workspace by choosing Manage Workspace via the Workspace menu.

1. Open the html file in Notepad.
2. Locate the line that defines your flash movie. It will look similar to:

   var so = new SWFObject("youProjectName.swf", "Captivate", "640", "511", "10", "#CCCCCC");

3. Right after that line, insert this line:

   so.addParam("seamlessTabbing", "false");

4. Your code will now look similar to this:

   var so = new SWFObject("yourProjectName.swf", "Captivate", "640", "511", "10", "#CCCCCC");

   so.addParam("seamlessTabbing", "false");

Open the html file in your browser and start pressing the [tab] key. Tabbing will cycle through objects in the lesson but not jump out to your browser. The only drawback here is that you do need to edit the .html file every time you republish the project–a minor annoyance if it gets rid of a major headache.

If you know you will always want this behavior in all of your published projects, you can change the file on which your .html output is based. That file, named standard.htm is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\Templates\Publish\standard.htm.

by Lori Smith

Variables in Adobe Captivate 4 bring a lot of versatility to a project. Creating the variables you need for a project before you begin to add objects and create advanced actions is a best practice. But what happens when you are in the midst of creating a Text Entry Box and realize that you have forgotten to define a variable?

All you'll need to do to create the variable is close the Text Entry Box properties that you were working on, choose Project > Actions, select the Variables tab, create the variable, save it, close that dialog box, go back and re-open the Text Entry Box properties, click the Advanced tab and enter your variable. Whew! That was tiring!

Lucky for you, there is a little shortcut…

Assuming you have forgotten to create your variable beforehand, you can create it on the fly while still within the Text Entry Box properties.

Here is your Variables window before you create your Text Entry Box:

Next insert a new Text Entry Box onto a slide (or display the Properties of an existing Text Entry Box) and go to the Advanced tab.

You can see in the image below that there are no variables to choose from in the Variable Associated drop-down menu.

Type the name of the variable you'd like to create in the Variable Associated field.

Click OK to close the Text Entry Box properties and check out your list of variables (Project > Actions, Variables tab). Wow! There it is!

Very cool. Of course, I am now going to get on my soapbox and tell you that even if you create a variable on the fly, you should always update the Value and Description fields of the variable at some point.

***

However, the PDF document you publish with Captivate will
behave a little differently than PDFs you create from a print document.
If your Captivate lesson contained 50 slides, the resulting PDF you
Publish with Captivate won't contain 50 PDF document pages. Instead, the
PDF will contain a single video. Customer's will be able to watch the
video easily enough and use the Captivate playbar to move through the
lesson. However, printing the PDF becomes a challenge. Customer's will
only be able to print the slides contained in the PDF one slide at a time… they'll need to
pause the lesson and print. There is no way to print all of the slides
at one time (even if they select the Print All option in the Print
dialog box, only
one slide will print). Ouch!

You can get around this limitation
easily enough however by adding a widget to the Captivate project prior
to publishing. Here's how to do it.

***

If you've spent any time with Captivate's Text to Speech utility, you have probably discovered that the pronunciation of the spoken words isn't always perfect. Unfortunately, if you don't like it, there isn't a pronunciation editor in Captivate that will help, so you're stuck. Bummer! The end! Have a nice day.

Oh, you were looking for solutions here? In that case, read on.

Believe it or not, there is actually a pronunciation editor for the Text to Speech utility, but it's not part of the Captivate interface and you aren't likely to stumble upon it accidentally.

If you have installed Captivate and the Text to Speech Utility, you'll typically find the tool in the following location:

• Program [Captivate Installation Folder]\VT\Kate or Paul (depending on the agent you selected when you recorded)\M16\bin

There is an application hiding in the BIN folder called UserDicEng.exe.

Open UserDicENG.exe and the English User Dictionary Editor will open.

To change the pronunciation of a particular word:

1. Open the userdict_eng.csv dictionary file

   (Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\agent\M16\data-common\userdict\)

2. Click Add word
3. Type the original word into the Source field
4. Type the correct word into the Target field using the correct pronunciation (using the letters or the Pronunciation Symbols)

   You can always click Read to hear the pronunciation of the new, target word.

   

5. Click OK
6. When satisfied, click the File Save button
7. Click the Close button

   The new pronunciation will be used by your Speech Agent within Captivate the next time you convert text to speech.