Over the past several months I've written myriad articles extolling the value of using styles on slide objects (including how to reset them, clone them and how to create styles on the fly).
Have you been a good developer? Are you using Object Styles? I'm going to give each and every one of you the benefit of the doubt... of course you are. But even if you are the most disciplined user of styles, there could be trouble ahead. Since several object properties are not contained within an Object Style, keeping things consistent can still prove challenging... even if you fully utilize styles.
Let's take just one group on the Properties panel as an example. The Transform group (Captivate 5.5) or Position and Size group (Captivate 5) contains options that will not be found in the Object Style Manager when you create or edit a style.
What would happen if you manually used a non-style option on a selected slide object? Here's a scenario: let's say that you want to change the width of a single text caption. That's simple enough to accomplish via the Properties panel (using the Transform/Position and Size group). After changing the width of the caption, you then decide that you want all of the text captions in your project to use the new width. Since the width option isn't something that's part of an Object Style, you'll need to go from slide to slide and manually change the width of every caption. Not very efficient, eh?
Read on...
After manually changing the width of the text caption, ensure the caption is selected and then, go to the Properties panel and on the far right of the group, click the Apply to all button.
You will see two choices in the drop-down menu: Apply to all items of this type and Apply to all items of same style. If you choose the former, all text captions in the project will get the new width. Nice! If you choose the latter, only the text captions using the same style as the selected text caption will update. This is a nice option if you only want to change the width of a specific group of captions.
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