Adobe Captivate: Custom Cursors Anyone?

by Kevin Siegel  

A student in a recent online Captivate class asked me if it was possible to create a custom mouse cursor for a Captivate eLearning lesson. Sadly, I had to tell the student that it wasn't possible. It's certainly simple enough to change the appearance of any selected mouse cursor (via the Properties panel), but Captivate is not an image-editing application so you cannot create custom cursor images (cur files).

While you cannot create cursor files (CUR's) within Captivate, you can easily create your own, and you can find a bunch of cursor images on the web. For instance, a quick Google Search took me to RealWord Graphics where I found a Gallery area containing an impressive array of free cursor images. The images can be downloaded and used within a Captivate project. If you aren't happy with the cursor images found in the RealWorld Gallery, they provide a Cursor Editor that allows you to quickly create your own cursor.

Download a Cursor Image From the RealWorld Gallery and Use It Within Captivate

Here's all you need to do if you want to download a CUR file from the RealWord Graphics site.

1. After accessing the RealWord Graphics site, click the Gallery tab.  
2. Click the cursor image group you'd like to download. (In the image below, I went with a collection of Aqua Green Cursors.)
   
    
3. Click the link below the image preview and save the file to your computer. (The Aqua Green Cursors group that I selected had several similar cursors. I went with Normal.cur.)
   
   

Note: Pay particular attention to where you saved the file. You'll be opening the location of the cur file next in Captivate.


4. From within Captivate, select a mouse pointer on any slide. 
5. On the Properties panel, click the Browse button and open the cur file that you downloaded earlier.
   
   
   
   In the image below, notice that the standard mouse pointer has been replaced with my downloaded custom cursor.
   
     

See Also: Change the Mouse Pointer Project-Wide.

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Comments

[Mike]

Hi Kevin,

Yes, this all makes sense above.

One of my colleagues asked me why he cannot see a list of displayable cursors in the Properties window for the Mouse. I took a look at his file and when I selected a mouse on a slide and then viewed the Properties tab for the Mouse, there were no cursors displayed. I clicked the Browse button and it is defaulting to the Cursors folder under Windows. We can certainly select one of those cursors and it will plot on the slide...but, what we want is for a list of cursors to be displayed in this list box. Note, his original file contains this list of cursors. However, when he copied this file (and I do not know how he did the copy...Save As or Copy under Explorer), he lost the list of cursors and I cannot figure out how to reconnect this list. Unfortunately, he has done significant amount of work in the "copied" file. Note, we originally used Adobe Captivate 4 to record are movies on another workstation where the application has unique cursors. We then open up this file under ver 5.5 and save it as a 5.5 file. I have not experienced this issue with my movies. And as stated above, my colleague did not experience this until he "copied" the file. We are using Captivate 5.5. Do you have any ideas how we can get this list of displayable cursors to display in the "copied" file?

Thanks,

Mike

[Kevin Siegel]

Mike, I'm wondering where his working project file is currently. Is it on his local drive or a network drive. Also, if you open his project on your computer, do you have access to the cursor images?