Intro

Today an important patch for version 8 was released, to upgrade to version 8.0.1.242. Like with the update to 7 I wonder why this is not a full 8.1 or even 8.5 because there are not only a lot of bug fixes, many features were extended and even added. Have a look at "What is new" for a summary. And Dr. Pooja Jaisingh already blogged and posted some other links: Free Update to Captivate 8. In this article  by my friend Michael Lund you'll find not only his first reflections but clear instructions about installing the patch. But none mentioned some of my favourite new features: using SHIFT to constrain an ellipse/rectangle shape to a circle/square and big improvements to color management. 

But this post is not meant as a personal summary of the new features! As an advanced user I'm used to customize Captivate of course: custom themes, custom theme color palettes, custom shapes, custom effects and... custom workspaces because I'm using Captivate 8 in Expert mode. And when following Michael's (correct!) guidelines for updating, most of those custom items will get lost. If you do not are happy with the default items, never customize, do not bother to continue reading. However, if you share my frustrations about losing precious work, maybe you could find some workarounds in this article. Some of them can also help when you have to 'clean' a tired Captivate application by killing its Preferences.

Workflow 

Before installing an update, before deleting the Preferences folder (or using the CleanPreferences files in the subfolder 'utils'):

1. Find the custom items in these locations (I'm on Win7, will be different on Mac):
   
   

• Workspaces in   \Users\<yourprofile>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Captivate 8.0\Workspaces   
  which means they will be refreshed because this is in the Preferences folder. Here you see the default workspaces, each defined by two files.
  

  
  
  
  
• Custom Theme Color Palettes in   \Users\Public\Public Documents\Adobe\eLearning Assets\Layouts\8.0\ThemeColors
  Layouts is one of the folders you have to delete before installing a patch.
  

  
  
  
  
• Custom Themes in  \Users\Public\Public Documents\Adobe\eLearning Assets\Layouts\8.0\en_US
  I will mostly not save my custom themes in this folder, but better check if you have some there. The last item in the path can of course be different if you didn't install the US English version as I did.
  

  
  
  
  
• Custom Effects contrary to the themes, I like to have some custom effects in the Gallery with other effects in a subfolder Custom:
  

  
  The Gallery can have more custom items. Eventually check also the folder en_US in the installation folder. Maybe you have edited some of the files there as well.
  
  

Copy all the custom items to a safe place

Install the update, or Clean Preferences

Copy the custom items back to the same locations described above.

Of course, if you want to go back to Expert mode to be able to use the custom workspaces, you'll have to edit the Preferences again: