Adobe Captivate,Rapid e-learning authoring,Captivate Preferences,eLearning

Have you ever found yourself manually changing the ‘Timing’ and ‘Transition’ properties for every Adobe Captivate object in your e-learning project? Have you torn out your hair everytime you had to change the ‘Timing’ & ‘Transition’ properties of Captivate objects for each e-learning project you made in Captivate? Did you know that Captivate allows you to share/re-use these object default values across slides, projects and sessions?

In Adobe Captivate 4, we have added a facility to configure “Object defaults” which includes Timing properties(Display for & Appear after) and Transition(Effect, In & Out timings). You could set these values once and Adobe Captivate would remember these values forever i.e. throughout the project and even across projects. Incase, you want a different value for these properties for any Captivate object then you could always go ahead and change them in the properties dialog( under the ‘Options’ tab). And the best part is that when you insert that object the next time, Captivate would still pick up the default values. So you need not worry about the timing and transition properties of Captivate object once you have set them as Object defaults.

Now lets see how actually can we set the object Defaults:

Whenever you want to fall back to the factory settings for these properties, you could use “Restore Selected” and “Restore All” buttons. “Restore Selected” re-stores the values for the object selected in the ‘Select:’ dropdown. “Restore All” re-stores the values for all the objects in the ‘Select:’ dropdown. Here you could change other properties at well such as Slide duration, Background color etc. I would like to re-emphasize that the changes made here are remembered across  projects.

Once you are done with setting the values, you could also re-use/share them. Adobe Captivate gives you an option where-in you could export these values, which get saved in a .cpr file. Now you can easily re-use/share this .cpr file. You just need to import this .cpr file into your Adobe Captivate project and you have your object defaults in place.

Follow  these simple steps to export the .cpr file:

• Launch Captivate and press Shift + F8. This would launch the preferences dialog.
• Make your settings at Global -> Defaults. Press Ok.
• Create a blank project.
• Go to File menu -> Export -> Preferences…
• Save the file as .cpr file.

Similarly inside a Captivate project,  from File menu ->Import ->Preferences…, you could bring in values stored in a .cpr file.