What the heck does the confirmation message

March 16, 2017

Joe S Ganci Follow

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March 16, 2017

What the heck does the confirmation message

Joe Ganci is President of eLearningJoe, LLC, a custom learning company located outside Washington. D.C. Joe has been involved in every aspect of multimedia and learning development. He holds a degree in Computer Science and writes books and articles about eLearning. He is widely considered a guru for his expertise in eLearning development and technology, and he consults with clients worldwide, creating eLearning modules and templates, often training personnel in their use and then making himself available to assist if necessary. Of course, Joe and his team also create eLearning from start to finish, performing the proper analyses, design needs, the development of the learning and its implementation. Joe evaluates eLearning results, both for his own work and the work of others for his clients. Joe is a Director with the International Association for Blended Learning (IABL), a nonprofit international organization whose goal is to promote the use of the best form of learning for each component of a learning curriculum across all industries and academia. This year he organized and ran the 24-Hour Conference IABL Online Conference. Joe is also a frequent teacher and presenter online and at industry conferences and client sites (during times without a pandemic!) , especially on the subject of eLearning design and development tools. His tool reviews appear each month in Learning Solutions Magazine and he is the recipient of several awards and many letters of recommendation for his work in eLearning, including a Lifetime Achievement Award way back in 1999 and the second ever eLearning GuildMaster Award in 2013. His mission is to improve the quality of eLearning with practical approaches that work.

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I received a short question today: “I can’t figure out what the confirmation message Copy-Paste all references does.”

Here’s what this is about. Ready?

This is referring to the Confirmation Message in the Preferences.

Whenever you copy an object in Captivate, you copy anything that is “attached” to it.

Here are some examples:

1. If you copy an object that has an audio file attached to it, when you paste the copied object, it will carry the audio file with it. If you are pasting the object within the same file, because the audio file is already in the file, you will see in the library that the number of times the audio file is in use in the file has increased by 1.

2. If you paste the object with the attached audio in a new file, if the audio is not already in the new file, it will be pasted into the new file as well and you’ll see it now in the library and attached to the object.

3. If you copy a button that, when triggered, executes an advanced action in which it uses the Play Sound action, Captivate is smart enough to know to copy that audio as well if it isn’t already in the new file.

4. If you copy a button that, when triggered, uses a standard action such as Continue, Pause, Go to Previous Slide, Go to Next Slide, etc., the action will copy as well.

5. On the other hand, if you copy a button and its action is to Jump to Slide 2 (or the slide’s label), you’ll find that when pasting within the same file, all is well. However, when you paste into a new file, the action reverts to Continue because the Slide 2 in your new file isn’t the same as the Slide 2 in the old file. Even if you label them both the same, it won’t work because they aren’t the same slide, just as two men named Henry are not the same man. If the original showed this:

Jump to 2

When pasted in the same file in which it was copied, you’ll not lose the link because the slide referenced is present:

Jump to 2

However, when pasted in a different file, it will look like this:

Continue

6. If you have a button’s action perform this advanced action in the original:

Again, you won’t have a problem if you paste the copied button in the same file. However, if you paste the button in a different file, you’ll see this instead:

Guess what, though? The advanced action was also pasted, only because of the dialog object is missing, it’s now incomplete and therefore not attached to the pasted button.

If you look under Project > Advanced Actions, you’ll see it there. Open it and you’ll see:

If you have an equivalent object to show similar to the dialog in the original file, you can set it here, and then have the button you pasted point to this advanced action again.

If you set the button to the advanced action without opening the advanced action and fixing the missing Show object, then the Ocean Waves sound will play and the Show action will be ignored.

If you’ve understood all the above, you should know understand that the confirmation message to which you refer in your question is alerting you to the fact that references will follow objects you copy and paste. It’s a reminder that you should double-check that your pasted item didn’t lose anything along the way due to a misunderstanding as to how and when references are copied with the object.