One of the wonderful hidden advantages of using Captivate 5 and 5.5 over older versions of the program is the overall speed of the publishing process.
In legacy versions of Captivate, it could easily take 3-5 minutes to publish a moderately-sized project as a SWF. Make a change to project (even a minor typo fix on a single slide) and you will need to once again wait the entire 3-5 minutes for the publish process to complete. With Captivate 5 (and 5.5), I've seen my publishing wait time lower by as much as 95%. It's a staggering improvement. Kudos to the Adobe engineers for working this out.
But...
I have come across an issue where some of my updated slides didn't show the updates in the published content. I'm not sure why this occurs, but I did find a way to ensure my published lessons always show my edits. When publishing the final version of your lesson, select Force re-publish all the slidesfrom the Advanced Options area in the lower right of the Publish dialog box. With this option selected, the publishing process will take much longer. Nevertheless, all of your edits will make it into the published lesson.
I've created thousands of eLearning projects using Captivate (hundred in Captivate 5). During all of that time, I've only had a few slides fail to to show my updates once published. With that in mind, it is not necessary for you to leave the Force re-publish all the slides option selected all the time. Remember, using this option will increase your wait time during the Publish process. However, to be safe, it's a good idea to Force re-publish at least the final version of each lesson.
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