October 5, 2010
Adding custom navigation buttons to imported PowerPoint slides
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(5)
October 5, 2010
Adding custom navigation buttons to imported PowerPoint slides
(5)

Many trainers start their eLearning content authoring from MSPowerPoint. And then use tools like Adobe Captivate or Adobe Presenter to covert these PPTs into elearning courses.  Captivate automatically adds click based navigation to progress from one slide to another when you import a PPT slide deck into Captivate. But some of us prefer to provide something more fancy, with custom navigation buttons to move back or advance forward thru an imported PPT slide deck. A popular way to do this is to add text buttons or click boxes using Captivate.

Now if your PPT slide deck had custom animations that advanced based on a mouse click (or keyboard shortcut), this tends to interfere with the Captivate navigation buttons added to the same slide. If the ‘on success action’ for your Captivate button is set ‘Continue’, it doesn’t go to the next slide all the time.  If you set it to ‘go to the Next Slide’, it then skips the PPT animations on that slide.

This problem can be resolved using this workaround:

1.       When importing the PPT slide deck, choose -> ‘advance slides automatically’.

2.       Insert text buttons on the slides that require navigation. Label them appropriately as ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’.

3.       Set the ‘on success action’ for the ‘Previous’ button to ‘go to the previous slide’.

4.       Choose ‘execute advanced action’ as the on-success action for the ‘Next’ button.

5.       Create an advanced action with only “Continue” as the action in it and attach it to “Next” button as sown below

Click to add a custom action

Double-Click to add an action

Select Action 'Continue' from the dropdown

Select Action 'Continue' from the dropdown

This now ensures that all PPT animations are triggered one after the other based on the user click (or a chosen shortcut key-like ‘enter’). Also, like the original PPT flow, the user navigates to the next slide on clicking the ‘Next’ button after all the animations on the current slide are completed.

5 Comments
2011-03-23 02:07:38
2011-03-23 02:07:38

I’ve been trying to get this to work. I’ve imported the PPT into captivate with the advance slides automatically and then followed the instructions for adding the Next & Previous buttons.
When I preview the project the slides don’t pause. The presentation just goes straight to the next slide, any ideas?
Thanks

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Anonymous
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2011-03-23 16:45:15
2011-03-23 16:45:15
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Anonymous
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Hi, if this is with Cp5, could you share the project? you could upload it on acrobat.com and mail the URL to shameer at adobe dot com

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2010-11-03 03:58:00
2010-11-03 03:58:00

my issue is with PPT’s that have automitac animations. the animations do not carry over correctly when imported into captivate. some will appear, others won’t, or just appear very quickly and then go away.

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Anonymous
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2010-11-03 09:41:52
2010-11-03 09:41:52
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Anonymous
's comment

Hi, is this issue with Cp5? if so, could you share the project, or some of the slides where you notice this issue?
Thanks,
Shameer

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2010-10-05 21:28:03
2010-10-05 21:28:03

[…] more here: Adding custom navigation buttons to imported PowerPoint slides … addthis_url = […]

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