Intro

Seven years ago I started blogging about Captivate (with version 4 – 5). Most subjects are more advanced, you’ll find many use cases for advanced and shared actions. Meanwhile I also have spent thousands of hours on the Captivate forums, answering questions ans solving issues. Moreover I am busy as a Consultant and a Trainer (for Captivate and other Adobe applications), both in live and online classes. Based on the combination of those ‘Captivate’ experiences with my former career as college professor, I planned to write this article to line up the three most important Challenges for any Captivate developer, especially for newbies.  It doesn’t matter whether you are developing software simulations, soft skills training, responsive or normal projects, if you master those Captivate features you’ll feel more comfortable and save a lot of time. Bonus for me: less questions on the forums . Imagine standing before this natural stone porch, in the middle of the most beautiful desert in the world. You got that Captivate license, but how to start, where to go?

Challenge/Skill 1: Timeline

Why?

Captivate’s Timeline is without any doubt one of the first stumbling blocks for Captivate newbies. This observation is based on the many problems popping up in forums and social media, on my experiences with consultancy and while offering basic training. It is not the normal timeline that you have in video applications, or in animation apps. It shows all objects at once on the stage, timeline is per slide, not for the whole project. Lot of reasons to be confused. Pausing the timeline by a command or by an interactive object is THE key to building interactivity in a Captivate course which is the main reason why you have chosen for an eLearning authoring tool instead of a video capturing tool. Understanding the Timeline and being able to control should be the first priority of any Captivate learning (and training) process. How do you stop this touareg caravan ?

Resources

Nothing can replace a live (or virtual) training for this challenge, but recently I published a sequence of 5 articles on my blog and in the eLearning Community to clarify this subject.  Here are the links, not in the ‘logical’ sequence which I used for publishing, but ranked by importance:

Pausing the Timeline, why and how?

Captivate Timeline(s) in cptx-file demystified

Introduction

Color codes and shortcut keys

Captivate Timeline in cpvc (Video Demo)

If you don’t like reading a blog post, but prefer watching an interactive movie (published rescalable HTML-file):

Captivate’s Timeline

Audio and Pausing

Challenge/Skill 2: Quiz

Why?

Captivate quiz and score slides have pretty strict rules. A lot of functionality is built in the quizzing and score master slides. The two-step Submit process, the priority of the embedded objects cause a lot of problems for starting Captivate users. That explains why every blog post I ever wrote about Quizzing is very popular. Most of them, even after many years, are still visited daily. The challenge here is about the normal Quiz slides, not custom Quiz slides that are created using standard objects, widgets, variables and advanced/shared actions. Those custom question slides are challenging for intermediate/advanced users (watch out for a later blog post for those users). Drag&Drop slides, used as Question slides can be included in the starter’s challenge because they make a quiz more engaging.

What a relief when the car transporting our food and cook was found after a long quest:

Resources

Some of these blog posts do need an update, although most of the information is still valid

Question Question Slides – part 1     with the new Review buttons in Captivate 9 the confusion Next-Skip is gone

Question Question Slides – part 2

Knowledge Check Slides

Drag&Drop tips

Drag&Drop Captivate 9 – InBuilt states

Drag&Drop Tweaks

Quizzing System Variables

Review before Retake

Fluidize your Quizzes

Feedback in Fluid Boxes Quiz

ChallengeSkill 3: Theme

Why?

It is one of the most hidden gems in Captivate: design of any project can be streamlined when using a custom Theme. A theme includes all object styles, master slides, skin and defaults for software simulations. All are based on a (custom) Theme colors palette, which can even be applied to most Learning Interactions. Creating or editing a theme before starting any project may seem a waste of time, but I guarantee that it will save a lot of time in the process. Small changes to the design, so often asked for, are done in minutes. In many circumstances a well-designed theme makes templates superfluous.

Resources

Here are some links to get you started with Themes and Theme colors:

What’s in a Theme/Template?

Theme Colors

Editing Themes in CP2017

Conclusion

This is my personal view on the stumbling blocks for Captivate starting users. I am not pointing to any step-by-step work flow which may seem astonishing. My focus is on what is often causing the most frustrations for the so-called ‘newbies’, whatever their experience with other applications. As a college professor I used Flipped classes long time before the word was invented: do not spend valuable training time by explaining processes that can easily be found somewhere (videos). Students do not need a trainer for them. Spend class time by taking away obstructions that are slowing down the learning process.

Updated this blog post with more resources (June 2018).