The Logical Blog by IconLogic

TECHSMITH CAMTASIA: Extending Video Frames

After adding a video asset to the Timeline in Camtasia, it's likely you'll want to freeze a specific part of the video to allow for other Timeline objects to appear (such as annotations or images).   In the image below, I've added a video to Track 1 on my Timeline.

When previewing, I noticed that the video ended too soon. I needed to freeze a portion of the video for 10 seconds so that overlay text added to a different track had time to appear and be read by the learner.   I positioned the Playhead on the Timeline where I wanted to freeze the action in the video. Then I right-clicked the video (not the Playhead but the video object on the Timeline) and chose Extend Frame.

In the Duration (seconds) field, I typed 10 and then clicked the OK button.

The change to the selected video was ever-so-subtle. In the image below, I've added the green and red arrows for emphasis. The red arrow is pointing to a thin vertical line on the video asset. The line marks the end of the 10-second frame freeze that I added via the Extend Frame option. The green arrow indicates the 10 seconds that the video has been frozen.

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Looking for TechSmith Camtasia training or support? Check out these hands-on, instructor-led classes. If you prefer something a little more private, we also offer one-on-one Camtasia mentoring, we've got you covered.

ARTICULATE STORYLINE: Random Text... It Rocks!

I was cranking away recently on an Articulate Storyline project. On one slide, I had the layout done but was waiting for the final text from the client. I created a shape but couldn't go further without the client's text. At the very least, I wanted some placeholder text, so I could finish the slide by formatting the boxed text.   And that was when I was reminded of an awesome Storyline feature: random text. In the image below, you can see the shape I've added to a slide. It still needs text that I can format.

I typed the following line of text into the shape: =Lorem().

And check out what happens after I press the ENTER key.

Pretty cool, eh? But I know what you're thinking... Lorem ipsum? If real words are more your style, it's no problem. Type =Rand() instead.

After pressing the ENTER key, it was all about the quick brown fox. Pretty cool, eh?

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Looking for Storyline training or support? Check out these awesome live, online, instructor-led classes. Also, if you need help with Storyline development or if you'd like one-on-one Storyline mentoring, we've got you covered.

INTUIT QUICKBOOKS: Using Built-In Templates to Communicate with Your Customers, Vendors, and Employees

One of the best-kept secrets in QuickBooks is that it contains dozens of pre-made letters you can use to communicate with your customers, vendors, or employees. One of the things I cover in my Quickbooks classes is templates.   For customers, templates include everything from collection and bounced check letters to an apology or approval/denial of credit. Vendor letters include a request for credit or a charge dispute. And using these templates, you can easily acknowledge your employees’ birthdays or inform them of their vacation or sick time! You can also easily edit the pre-made templates or make your own.   To begin, click the Company menu and choose Prepare Letters with Envelopes:

For this example, I selected Collection Letters. On the first few screens, I selected and then reviewed the Recipients.

You can decide if the tone of your letter is to be formal, friendly, or even harsh. In my example, I went with a Friendly collection notice.

I filled in the name and Title of the person who is going to be signing the letter.

From there, QuickBooks performs a little magic by taking you into Microsoft Word and essentially creating a finished document with the relevant information that it got from QuickBooks.

You can edit the documents or print them. In addition, if you switch back to QuickBooks, this dialog box appears and allows you to create and print envelopes to go along with the letter.

Click OK and you will again be transported into Word, where you will be able to print the envelopes. To be honest, the hardest part of the entire process is figuring out how to properly feed the envelopes into your printer so they don’t print backward or upside down! But that is a topic for another day.

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Rosemary McCracken is a computer trainer with over 25 years of experience in the classroom. She teaches all levels of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Visio, and Outlook. In addition to Microsoft products, she also teaches QuickBooks, InDesign, HTML/CSS, and WordPress. Rosemary has a B.S. from James Madison University. She is Microsoft Office Expert Certified and is also a Certified Online Training Professional.

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Rosemary is teaching several IconLogic classes including HTML5 Basics, CSS, Styles Basics Training, and several classes on QuickBooks.

MICROSOFT POWERPOINT & OFFICE 365: Three Cheers for Editable Icons

Microsoft is constantly updating the applications that make up Office 365. After a recent update, I was delighted to see that PowerPoint (and Word and Excel for that matter) not only include icons, the icons can be modified (change colors at will), ungrouped, and then edited as needed.   I'll be focusing on using icons in PowerPoint during this article, but the same functionality exists if you're using the other Office 365 tools.   First, create a new PowerPoint presentation (or open an existing presentation). Working on any slide, select the Insert tab on the Ribbon. You'll find the Icons tool in the Illustrations group.

After clicking Icons, the Insert Icon dialog box opens.

I was specifically looking for a crab icon so I selected the Animals category from the list at the left. I selected the crab icon and then clicked the Insert button. (You can also double-click an icon to add it to a slide.)

Once the icon was inserted onto the slide, changing its Fill color was as simple as right-clicking. (In the image below, I've changed the color from its default black to red.)

I also needed to modify the crab's claws (I wanted each claw to be a bit longer). I ungrouped the icon by right-clicking it and choosing Group > Ungroup. (I clicked Yes to the alert that appeared.)

I right-clicked the icon again and chose Edit Points.

I zoomed closer to the slide and then dragged the points making up the claw until I had the length I wanted. How cool is it that you can easily edit these icons?

Note: If you don't see an Icons icon on the Insert tab of the Ribbon, or you're unable to ungroup/edit the icons, check your PowerPoint version (it's possible that your version is older than mine). To check your PowerPoint version, click the File tab and then choose Account. Click the About PowerPoint button. The version number is listed at the top of the About dialog box.

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Do you need help with your PowerPoint presentation? Bring an existing PowerPoint deck to an open-forum style live, online workshop where AJ Walther, our Chief Creative Officer, will help you get moving in the right direction toward a fresh and modern design for your presentation.

Hands-On Workshop in Houston, TX: Create an Articulate Storyline 360 eLearning Course In a Day

I'm teaching a hands-on workshop in Houston May 3: "Create an Articulate Storyline 360 eLearning Course In a Day."

 

Bring your own laptop (use the free 30-day trial version of Storyline for the class), start with a blank project, and leave with a working eLearning course.

 

You can listen to a podcast about the session here.

 

You can register here.

ARTICULATE STORYLINE: Logical Scene Numbering

When I work with scenes in Articulate Storyline, I like it when the number that accompanies each scene is logical. Take the three scenes below for instance. I'm creating an eLearning project for a zoo, so naturally I have scenes for Big Cats, Elephants, and Exotic Birds.

Because I created the Big Cats scene first, it was automatically tagged as my Starting Scene (as indicated by the red flag in the image above).   Next, I created the Elephants scene, followed by the Exotic Birds scene. Notice in the image above that in addition to having appropriate names, the scenes are logically numbered (1, 2, and 3).   The scene numbers are based on their creation order. While logical, the numbers do not indicate the order in which any scene might be seen by my learners. In fact, I can make any scene the Starting Scene and, using Triggers, I can make the third scene appear before the second scene.   I created a fourth scene and named it Home. On the Home scene, I added three buttons to a slide. Each of the buttons were given Triggers that jumped to a different scene in the Story.

I then made the Home scene the Starting Scene (this is easy to do with a simple right-click on the scene via the Story View).   After making the fourth scene (the Home scene) the Starting Scene, the drama started. In the image below, notice that the pesky Home scene is positioned correctly (above the other scenes). And you can clearly see the arrows indicating the button jumps between the Home scene and the other scenes.

But do you also see the horror in the image above? Look at that number 4 to the left of the Home scene's name. Noooooo! The Home scene is my first scene, and as far as I'm concerned, it should be numbered with a 1, not a 4. Of course, Storyline doesn't agree with me... a numbering sequence of 4, 1, 2, 3 is perfectly fine!   At the end of the day, the scene numbers don't truly matter. Learners will be able to move freely around the zoo, they'll never see the numbers, and won't ever know that the scene numbers are out of order.   But I'll know the numbers are out of whack... and so will you!   Fortunately, while not obvious, the fix is easy.   While in Story View, select the scene that's out of order and cut it to the clipboard. Without selecting anything, immediately paste the scene back into Story View.   And that's that. If you're like me, you'll be delighted to see that the scenes are numbered logically in the Story View (which is truly the only way to go, right?).

Looking for Storyline training or support? Check out these awesome live, online, instructor-led classes. Also, if you need help with Storyline development or if you'd like one-on-one Storyline mentoring, we've got you covered.

ADOBE CAPTIVATE: Adding Text Hyperlinks

Adding a hyperlink to an interactive object in Adobe Captivate has never been a problem. Select the object (click box, button, or text entry box) and, on the Properties Inspector, Actions tab, change the On Success to Open URL or file.

Type the web page address into the URL area and that's it.

Hyperlinking text within a text caption isn't quite as straight forward. After adding text to a caption, there isn't an Action tab on the inspector (therefore, no apparent way to create a hyperlink).   There is a way to accomplish the task, however. From within the caption, select the text you'd like to be clickable (you have to highlight the text, not just select the caption) and then, on the Properties Inspector, Character area, locate and click the Insert HyperLink icon.

From the Link To drop-down menu, choose Web Page and then, in the field below, type the web address you'd like to use.

In the image below, I've linked a single word to the IconLogic website. The appearance of the text can easily be changed via the Character options on the Properties Inspector.

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If you need to learn Adobe Captivate, we've got you covered with an awesome number of live, online classes. If you need help developing your next eLearning project, or if you just need some quick one-on-one mentoring, we've got you covered there too.

Adobe RoboHelp 2019: The Essentials Now Shipping from Amazon.com

We are proud to announce that our newest book, Adobe RoboHelp 2019: The Essentials workbook is now available on Amazon.com as both a print book or eBook.

About the book:

“Adobe RoboHelp 2019: The Essentials” is a self-paced, step-by-step workbook that teaches you the essential RoboHelp skills needed to create and deliver user assistance (software/application help systems, operations manuals, policies and procedures... the list is endless).

Step-by-step instructions guide you through the process of creating new RoboHelp projects and topics from scratch. Learn to import content from Microsoft Word and HTML files.

Enhance your topics with graphics, and interactive multimedia (using eLearning content created in Adobe Captivate).

Improve the navigation of your content by adding hyperlinks, indexes, and glossaries.

Increase your production efficiency by learning about cascading style sheets, variables, snippets, and master pages.

Learn how to control the look of final output via Skins and presets.

Deliver content that can be consumed on any kind of device including desktops, laptop, smartphones, and tablets using output such as Responsive HTML5, WebHelp, HTMLHelp, and even eBooks.

This book features:

• All of the Adobe RoboHelp projects, images, audio files, and other assets to get started (Just download the free RoboHelp 30-day trial software from the Adobe website and jump in!)
• Dozens of step-by-step, hands-on activities
Confidence Checks to challenge your new skills
• Hundreds of supporting screen shots

You can order the print book here and the eBook (Kindle) here.

ADOBE ROBOHELP: Fixing Broken Links

Broken links... they happen (just like stuff).   Perhaps you imported HTML content into RoboHelp that contained one or more links. It’s possible that some of the links in the document were broken in the source file. If there are broken links in the document before you import the document, they’ll remain broken in RoboHelp when the imported content becomes a RoboHelp topic. And of course, there are all kinds of ways you can break a link all by yourself from within RoboHelp (it’s as simple as deleting a source topic or, when editing a topic in HTML view, deleting an important tag).   In the image below, a topic in my RoboHelp project contains a link (the link is supposed to go to a topic about the corporate policy on the consumption of alcohol during work hours).

While the link looks fine, it’s actually broken (the name of the target file is different than what is referenced in the HTML code). Anyone clicking the link is going to see the following page (instead of the information about alcohol).

Regardless of how a link gets broken, it’s great to know you can fix the problem easily. To begin, check your project for the existence of broken links by choosing Edit > Fix Broken Links.    If the Fix Broken Links box that appears is empty, awesome… you don’t have any broken links. In the image below however, you can see that I have a broken link in one of my topics.

After clicking the Replace button, all I needed to do was find the target topic (Alcohol Policy) and click the Link button.

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Adobe just released update 5 for Adobe RoboHelp 2019. To get the free update, choose Help > Updates. You'll see that version 14.0.5 is available for immediate download. All you'll need to do is click the Update button. Depending upon your internet speed, the update should only take a few minutes (you'll need to close RoboHelp while the update is in process). Adobe is planning to update RoboHelp regularly (the updates fix bugs and add features so it's a good idea to check for updates about once per month).

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If you're looking to learn Adobe RoboHelp, we've got you covered in these live, online instructor-led RoboHelp classes and mentoring sessions.

ADOBE CAPTIVATE: The Fix for Corrupt Themes

While attempting to apply a Theme to a Captivate project I received the alert shown below.

My only option was to click the OK button and try again. Of course, no matter how many times I attempted the task, I received the same failure message.   When Captivate misbehaves, the first thing I always attempt is to reset the program’s Preferences. There’s a handy utility for this located in the program’s application folder within a subfolder called Utils. With Captivate closed, browse to the Utils folder and open CleanPreferences (there’s a version for the Mac and PC).

Upon restarting Captivate, the cleaned Preferences file usually puts Captivate back in working order.   If resetting the Preferences file doesn’t work, plan B is to clear Captivate’s Cache folder. This option is found by opening Captivate’s Preferences dialog box (Edit menu for PC users; Adobe Captivate menu for Mac users) and, from the General Settings category, click the Clear Cache button.

Every once in a while, one or more of the theme files (they are .cptm files) get corrupt. When that happens, Captivate simply refuses to apply the themes and you’ll get the "Cannot apply..." error message shown in the first image above. While I cannot help you prevent corrupt theme files (if I find out what causes the corruption, I’ll be sure to share), I can show you how to replace the corrupt theme files with new files   First, with Captivate closed, go to Users > Public > Public Documents > Adobe > eLearning Assets > Layouts > 11_0. Copy the en_US folder and paste it in another location on your computer (this is going to be a backup copy of the en_US folder's contents, so I suggest giving it a name such as en_US_bk).

With Captivate still closed, go to Documents > My Adobe Captivate Projects > Layouts > 11.0 > en_US. Select and copy all of the .cptm files in the en_US folder.

Go back to Users > Public > Public Documents > Adobe > eLearning Assets > Layouts > 11.0 and open the en_US folder (this is the folder you backed up a moment ago).   Paste the .cptm files on your clipboard into this folder (replace the existing .cptm files when prompted). Restart Captivate and you’ll be able to apply the supplied Themes as before.

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Need to learn Adobe Captivate? Want to save on travel? Consider our live, online, and 100% interactive and hands-on classes. (If you prefer onsite training, send us an email. We can come to you!)