If you have struggled to find some Adobe Captivate examples for sources of inspiration, then feel free to check out my online portfolio.  It only makes sense that potential employers, hiring managers, fellow e.Learning professionals, coworkers, etc. want to see what you’re made of, then having some work examples seems like the obvious answer.

I have been using Adobe Captivate since it’s initial launch back in 2004.  I know that dates me, but it should provide a bit of context as I describe my journey with this software.  My first nightmare occurred after working for a month on a course.  I hadn’t created a copy of it nor were there things like the ‘Adobe Captivate Cached Projects’ in existence.  When I finally reached a support person at Adobe, I was told that I was basically out of luck.  My despair reached epidemic proportions.  Since that time, I have this tic that makes me hit ‘CTRL‘ ‘S’ every 5 minutes to prevent another such debacle.

I will provide a few tips & tricks that I’ve learned over the years if anyone is in need of ways to make this software work for you.

1. If you want to create, enhance or improve the complexity of your course, animations, functionality, branching options, reporting tools, etc. simply export the course into Adobe(R) Flash(R).  If you know how to use Flash, then you’ll find this option completely liberating.  I have found that Flash is a much more stable application and one that reads Captivate files quite easily.

2. When creating a new course, do a mass import of all assets (such as icons, images, audio files, animations, etc.)  All you have to do is go over to the ‘Library’ tab and select the ‘Import‘ folder.  You can import everything that you want; saving you time, effort and hassle.

3. Rename all the assets in your ‘Library’.  Although it is a bit tedious, it will save you lots of time later on, when trying to remember where in the world that image, icon, photo or object is in  your library.

4. Take the time to set up the defaults before starting the course creation.  It really will save you lots of time later if you make sure that all of your ‘Preferences’ are set the way you want. Things like default font for captions, length of slides, etc. can be chosen before starting to build your course.

5. If you want to make universal changes to your captions, take the easy route by exporting your Project Captions.  It will export into a Word document that is formatted with your content in a ‘table’.  Simply change all your captions there and then import them back into your Captivate file.

6. Beware of the Quiz slides.  I have found that this is REALLY buggy.  I go nuts trying to get these slides to work.  It doesn’t matter what Captivate version I use, the Quiz just never seems to work the way I want.  Reporting is another nightmare.  So, I typically put the Quizzes or Knowledge Checks into a separate Captivate file.