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Recently I presented a webinar about Interactivity in Captivate. It was not a public webinar, but composed of Adobe Community Professionals. Lot of the attendees were new to Captivate but well versed in other Adobe applications. However there were also some CP-experts. As usual I don’t present with Powerpoint, but with a Captivate presentation. That makes it possible to publish later as an interactive tutorial, which you'll be able to view. It needed some editing of course to allow full control to the learner. Narration was added as well.

The design is based on the Quick Start Project 'Wired' included in the Assets panel of 11.5.1.499. Based on it I created a personalized Theme, since that project in its non-responsive version has no master slides. The original fonts were replaced by two Adobe fonts (Termina and Filson Soft family). The interactions were recreated with workflows which I prefer over the embedded ones.

The goal was to show popular workflows to create interactivity. You will see: Branching (menu), Forced viewing, Progress bars, Click&Reveal, Drag&Drop, Knowledge Check slides, Games. In the webinar the presentation was used along demonstrations of the used workflows in simple examples, with lot of good practice tips. Lot of multi-state objects were used, Guides, import of source Photoshop files, shared/advanced actions and variables.

The menu slide after the start slide is the pillar. When you see a Back to Menu button appear, you'll be navigated back to this slide. The tooltip for this back button is part of the Rollover state.

Click to see the presentation in a rescalable version or watch the embedded version (fixed resolution) below:

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Did you like this presentation? Would you like more 'back to basics' blogs, or tutorials? Do you have questions? Are you able to recreate the demonstrated workflows? Lot of questions where I would like to see some answers.

15 responses

Thank you, Liev, for going back to basics. I have a lot of new users and they could use this type of help.

— Teri Warner

Thanks for the quick comment. My blog is not really meant for newbies, although I have some rare posts. This blog is just showing what is possible concerning interactivity, not a real tutorial.

— ir. Lieve Weymeis

Thanks for sharing Lieve!

— Vico van den Eventuin

Thanks for sharing this. I was looking for inspiration for a course I'm working on right now but I don't have the latest Cp versión that give the nice interactive templates. But I think I can recreate this in Cp9 easily.

— Nadyme

You're welcome. I never use any interaction provided with Captivate 11.5. You know that I'm a control freak. Any interaction in this tutorial was made from scratch.

Thanks for all you do. Yes I think I could mostly recreate everything you did but not as elegantly of course. I have been very active with captivate 9 to finish one big project. Now I'm back on captivate 2019 to work on another big project... I'm not a designer by trade but I find it very interesting to to dabble with this program. I'm still reading up on the correct use of fluid boxes. You have many posts on that and I'm going through all of them.

— Nikolaus

I am glad you appreciate my posts. I am preparing now a crash course for shared actions. Meant for the USE of them, not for the creation. It is a feature of Captivate which is largely underestimated for an unknown reason. You may be interested, I will offer some shared actions for free. Fluid Boxes do not really have my first focus, but indeed, when screening the posts, I did write some..

Well, I already have the first question for you. Once again it's a very basic one, how would I import some nice advanced actions into captivate 2019 from an old captivate 9 Project? Also with your help I made some complicated multiple-choice / variable advanced actions and I would like to reuse those in a responsive Project. Are shared actions a way to do that?

You can also copy objects which have advanced actions attached between projects. But you talk about versions which are rather different. Moreover copy/paste more often than not leads to problems when they are attached to slide events. Shared actions are indeed a safe alternative. I have tested - for a presentation about converting to HTML from SWF, presentation which was cancelled - extensively if you can open the Library of a very old project in a recent version and that works very well. Shared actions are IN the Library. The crash course (since no one in the Captivate team seems to be aware of the power of this feature) about Shared actions will show how easy it is to use an existing shared action even by someone starting with Captivate. As for responsive projects: I suspect you mean Fluid Boxes. Beware: they have a lot of limitations. Not sure every command from a non-responsive project will be possible. But you could start with a shared action, since it can be used as a template for an advanced action as well (another feature ignored by many).

Thanks! I have (to my own shame) never used shared actions but only AA. Can we convert those (another noob question for sure)?

No need to be ashamed. Although I have pushed and helped many users to try Advanced actions, my crusade to show the power of shared action is a total failure. Personally I reflect when needing advanced actions if it would not be better to have a shared action. Most of my projects have more shared than advanced actions. The crash course I told you about is just another way to convince a couple of newbies. In consultancy I often created shared actions with a short manual, so that the client will be able to reuse them without any need to script.

Is this crash course up already or in the works right now?

Not yet on my blog, some articles are in the eLearning community. Trying to structure in logical chunks. Have created too much: video, interactive video, text explanation...

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Interactivity in Captivate (Back to basics)

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