The Logical Blog by IconLogic

LIVE, ONLINE TRAINING: Stop Wasting Your Potential

by Jennie Ruby, COTP

We’ve all been to webinars: you sign up or register, then you log in to the webinar site a little before the scheduled time. Then you sit there. The screen displays a generic background, and the text says something like “The webinar will begin at 12:30.” And you sit. Your watch says 12:28. You see nothing new. You hear nothing new. So you leave to check your email or to watch the latest Cats versus Cucumbers video. Then, finally, you hear the webinar start.

Those minutes between the time when a student logs in and the time when the event actually starts are wasted potential. For live, instructor-led, online training we can do better than that typical webinar tradition.

When participants arrive at your classroom, instead of having them stare at a still screen with the start time plastered on it, use a real timer that is counting down to class time. Since the first space launch, a countdown has always generated excitement. Today, on a hot, summer day, in my classroom, at the end of a timer countdown, one of my participants typed in the chat window: “Happy New Year!” A countdown is fun, positive, and in some small way, exciting.

 

 

Now let’s think about that generic screen background. Sure, you can display your logo and the name of the class. But what about this? Instead of still imagery, you could have a looping slide show providing crucial information to your participants, even as they log in. One slide says “Welcome to the training on Topic X”; another shows a screenshot and says “Here is where you can find your chat window”; another says “Have you downloaded everything you need for the class?” Of course, not all of your participants will log in early, but those who do, will be well prepared for the class.

And what about that silent audio time? By the time students start arriving, you should be there to greet them on the audio. But for the really early students? How about a little background music, so that they can tell that their audio is working.

Soon, I’m planning on using an animated video to welcome my early arrivers. Previews of coming attractions, anyone? Because having students arrive early is to everyone’s benefit, let’s reward those who log in early with additional information, entertainment, and engagement. 

 

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Do you deliver live, online training? Are you using the up-to-the-minute best techniques in your online classroom? Join an upcoming Certification Program with ICCOTP and become a Certified Online Training Professional. 

 

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Jennie Ruby, COTP, has more than 20 years of experience in training delivery, and is much loved for her enthusiasm and energy in the classroom setting, whether online or in person. She is a published author and co-author of numerous training books, including Essentials of Adobe Presenter, Editing with Microsoft Word, and Writing for Curriculum Development. 

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.)

If you preview the project, you will see that the playbar is missing from the selected slide... and all of the subsequent slides. Assigning a value of 0 to the selected slide told Captivate to hide the playbar from that point forward.

 

...and it's never coming back... EVER!

 

Okay, so let's not be so dramatic. Do you want the playbar back? The process of bringing the playbar back is just as easy as hiding it. Select another slide on the Filmstrip (at the point where you'd like the playbar to reappear). Back on the Properties Inspector, On Enter drop-down menu, choose Assign. From the Assign drop-down menu, choose cpCmndShowPlaybar. Type 1 in the With field. (The number 1 tells Captivate that you want the playbar to appear from that slide onward.)

 

 

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Looking for Captivate training? We've got you covered.

 

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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.

ARTICULATE STORYLINE 3 & 360: New Tables Feature Added

by Kal Hadi, COTP

I frequently get questions from Storyline training students about the possibility of inserting tables into a project (actual tables with cells, columns, and rows instead of screen shots of tables). Up until yesterday, my answer about tables has always been “I wish.” However, if you're using Storyline 3 or 360 you'll be happy to find an awesome addition to the Text group on the Ribbon: Table (shown in the image below).

If you're not familiar with tables, they are very useful for structuring data, organizing content, and providing great accessibility and context. Articulate’s implementation of this new feature looks pretty awesome. (The only thing that I was hoping to find but didn’t was the ability to sort columns or rows alphabetically or numerically.) Once you insert a table and have it selected, you are given a Table Tools tab with Design and Format tabs. Using the Design tab, you can control style fills and borders or choose from a slew of preformatted table styles that include alternate “banded” rows and more. You are also able to designate rows as headers.

When it comes to formatting the table, you've got a ton of options. For instance, you can add/delete rows and columns, merge cells, change cell content alignment, and my favorite feature: Distribute Rows and Distribute Columns where you can easily make row heights and columns widths evenly. Spend some time with the new Tables feature and let me know what you think. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that you're going to be impressed.

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Kal Hadi is a Certified Technical Trainer (CTT) and Certified Online Training Professional (COTP) with more than 20 years of experience in computer graphics, imaging, and electronic publishing. Kal is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology Electronic Publishing graduate program. He is also the author of many books and papers in graphics and web publishing including multiple books on Articulate Storyline.

MADCAP FLARE: Hyperlinks vs. Cross-References

by Neil Perlin

If you look on Flare’s Insert ribbon, you’ll see one icon for Hyperlinks and another icon for a less familiar feature, the Cross-Reference. Both are flagged on the Insert ribbon and the Topic Editor toolbar in the image below. Also in the image below, notice that the topic has both a hyperlink and a cross-reference that seem to do the same thing: link users from one topic to another. However, they’re created differently and work differently.

Hyperlinks have been the link mainstay for years but they have two problems: A hyperlink is linked to a target but doesn’t “know” what its target actually is. For example, the hyperlink in the image above points to the “Frappe” target topic. If I change that topic’s title to “Milkshake,” the hyperlink still works but the wording is wrong. To fix this, I need to change the word “frappe” in the link to “Milkshake.” This is easy to do with search and replace, but it’s just one more thing to worry about. A hyperlink works fine in online outputs and even for print outputs like a PDF. But what happens if users print a PDF? The link obviously doesn’t work; users have to find the target via the table of contents or the index, if you created one. Otherwise, users have to flip through the pages to find the right content. The only solution is for you to change each hyperlink to a page reference by hand, which doesn’t even bear thinking about. Cross-references, also known as “xrefs,” solve both these problems nicely and add several other benefits. An xref “knows” what it’s linked to because it links to the target topic’s title. This means that you don’t have to type the text of the link, as you do with a hyperlink. Instead, the xref grabs the title of the target topic and automatically uses it as the link text. And if the target topic’s title changes, the link text changes automatically. For example, if I change the name of the target topic in the example above from “Frappe” to “Milkshake,” Flare changes the wording of the xref to match, as shown in the image below (where the wording of the hyperlink is now wrong). This makes link maintenance more efficient.

Flare automatically updates the wording when you generate a target that contains the topic. If you want to update the xref during development, without having to generate the target, choose Tools > Update Cross-References to update the xrefs for the topic. When you create a print target like a PDF, Flare automatically converts the xref’s format from a link style to a page reference. For example, “cross-reference to Milkshake” in the example above changes to “See Milkshake on page XX” or similar wording (which you can control) by modifying the settings of the mc-format property for the MadCap|xref style for the Default and Print mediums. If you have to create online and print targets, this automatic style adjustment may be enough to make you a big fan of xrefs. Xrefs can adjust their wording based on the proximity of the starting topic to the target topic. If the two topics wind up being two or more pages apart in your print output, Flare automatically changes the xref wording to “See XX on page YY.” However, if the starting and target topics wind up one page apart, Flare automatically changes the xref wording to “See XX on the next/previous page.” And if the starting and target topics wind up on the same page, Flare automatically changes the xref wording to “See XX above/below.” This puts the wording of the link into a realistic context. Xrefs aren’t perfect. They can only link between topics in a given output target. They can’t link to topics in different output targets, or to external files such as external URLs or PDFs. For those, you still have to use traditional hyperlinks.  Even with that limitation, I consider xrefs to be one of the most useful features in Flare and one with no equivalent in competing tools (that I’m aware of). I’d been using hyperlinks since 1986 by the time I got involved with Flare in 2004 and didn’t quite understand what an xref was at first. But when I saw what they could do, particularly the automatic style adjustment feature, that made me a stalwart fan of xrefs. Give them a try. I think you’ll be pleased.

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Neil Perlin is MadCap-Certified for Flare and is a long-time consultant, troubleshooter, and trainer for the tool, going back to MadCap’s founding in 2004. He also has years of experience with older tools like RoboHelp and Doc-To-Help and now defunct tools like ForeHelp. He is also a certified app developer, trainer, and consultant for the ViziApps app development platform. You can reach him at [email protected] and at NeilEric on Twitter.

ADOBE CAPTIVATE: Free Matching Images and Videos

by Kevin Siegel, COTP, CTT

During the first day of my Adobe Captivate Beginner class, attendees learn how to import and work with both images and videos. During the video portion of the class, we import a Flash Video (flv) which students love because without the background color in the video, it's possible to include an animated guide throughout a lesson. The problem with Flash Videos is that they can be difficult to create on your own and, worse, there isn’t a surplus of Flash Videos available on the web (free or otherwise). Even if you managed to find a video, it's unlikely that it matches the other images you've already used in your project. Fortunately, the eLearning Brothers have come to the rescue. You’ll find matching cutout people and videos. Best of all, the assets are free if you’ve got Adobe Captivate 9 or 2017. To access the assets, from within a Captivate project, click Assets on the toolbar and then click Get Free eLearning Assets. If this is your first time accessing the assets, you’ll need to either login with your free eLearning Brothers account credentials or create an account.

Once you’re on the Assets page, click Cutout People. If you scroll down to the bottom of the available assets, you’ll see a category that you’ve likely overlooked on previous trips to the Assets area: Videos.

Here is where things get pretty awesome: I searched the assets for a character that I've used before: Melanie.   Not only did I find my character posed in both business and casual attire, but there were videos as well. While at first glance the videos looked similar to the images, this was surely wishful thinking on my part.

After downloading the image I needed, I focused my attention on the videos. I quickly discovered, much to my delight, that Flash Video (flv) is one of the available download formats.

In the picture below you can see the image asset that I downloaded on the left; the downloaded Flash Video on the right. (Because Flash Videos do not have a background color, they works perfectly just about anywhere.) And how awesome is it that the image and video are of the same image and.. and... wearing the same clothes?

I swear it's as if I spent a lot of money and/or invested a ton of time on this. (I mean, how much would it cost to hire the actor, get the pictures, create the video, and remove the backgrounds?) However, nothing could be farther from reality. Honestly I spent maybe five minutes grabbing both assets and adding them to my Captivate project. And I never even pulled out my credit card.   Thanks Adobe... and thanks eBros!

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Looking for Captivate training? We've got you covered.

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Kevin Siegel, CTT, COTP, is the founder and president of IconLogic and ICCOTP. 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.

eLearning Development: Hide desktop icons while recording software simulations

When recording software simulations or video demos using Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, or TechSmith Camtasia, you might need to record something that includes your desktop. Of course, that begs the question: how cluttered is your desktop?

Does the image below remind you of a desktop of someone near and dear to your heart? 

Look, your desktop is your desktop, so clutter away. However, including the clutter--the icons--in your eLearning project is not a good idea. Besides being a security risk, nobody wants to see your desktop icons.

 

Fortunately, you don't have to clean up your desktop before recording your screen. All you need to do is right-click your desktop and choose View > Show desktop icons. 

 

 

If the icons were there, they are gone. If they were hidden, they're back.

 

Remember this little gem the next time you're getting ready to click the Record option on your eLearning tool of choice, and you'll save yourself a bunch of work de-cluttering.

 

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