Adobe Captivate ( Release) User Guide (2023)

Level : Beginners Created : October 10, Size : 1. Summary on tutorial Creating an Adobe Captivate 9 Project. Computer PDF guide you and allow you to save on your studies. Download the file. Login or Create an account to leave a feedback. Office Computer programming Web programming Database 93 Operating system 68 Mathematics 60 Graphics 56 Other 54 Network 50 Computer security 46 Computer architecture 23 design and analysis Online courses in Videos.

Creating an Adobe Captivate 9 Project in Videos. You already know that Captivate contains a lot of panels and that those panels can be shown or hidden using the Window menu. In the Advanced Interface Mode, the Captivate interface offers even more flexibility. In this section, you will learn how to move the panels and create a unique custom screen:.

When a panel is moved above a possible docking location, a blue outline appears on the screen. Releasing the mouse at that moment docks the panel at the location highlighted by the blue outline. This action docks the HTML5 tracker panel with the Properties inspector and the Library panel, as shown in the following screenshot:. This first action illustrates how to dock the panels that are initially floating on the interface.

You will now do the opposite to illustrate that a panel that is initially docked can be turned into a floating panel. The Library panel is now a floating panel, even though it was docked by default. You have now arranged the panels in a truly unique way. This customized arrangement of your panels is called a workspace.

The Advanced Interface Mode of Captivate allows you to apply your own unique custom workspaces. Depending on the project you are working on, the size of your computer screen, your working habits, and so on, you might want to have several workspaces and quickly switch between them. In this section, you will first learn how to reset to the default workspace.

Then, you will create and save a new custom workspace. The default workspace you see when you first open Captivate is called the Classic workspace, as shown in the top-right corner of your screen:. After doing this, your Captivate screen reverts to what it looked like when you opened the application at the beginning of this chapter:. The default Classic workspace is an excellent starting point for defining a custom workspace.

Just like the Properties inspector, the Timing inspector always shows the properties pertaining to the object you select. This workspace is very practical when you have to precisely define the timing and apply effects to the selected object.

You will now save this panel layout as a new workspace. Note that a Timing button now replaces the Classic button. You can use this button to switch between the Classic workspace and your own custom Timing workspace! You now know all the tools to create custom workspaces. Take some time to experiment with these tools on your own. Try turning panels on and off using the Window menu.

When you feel like you have a great workspace, save it under a name of your choice. Note that the Window Workspace menu displays the same items as the workspace switcher button at the top-right corner of the screen.

Note that the default Classic workspace is not listed. This means that this default workspace cannot be renamed or deleted. Confirm that the Properties and Library buttons are back in the top-right corner. This indicates that you are back in normal interface mode. If you want to use your custom Timing workspace again, you first need to return to Advanced Interface Mode, and then restart Captivate.

Before moving on to the next topic, these are the key points to keep in mind when creating custom workspaces:. One of the most recent additions to the Toolbar is the Community icon. Clicking this icon opens the Adobe eLearning Community portal inside Captivate. The Adobe eLearning Community Portal is the best place to find information and to interact with other Captivate users.

The eLearning Community Portal features the following:. These points can be turned into a wide variety of exciting incentives, including free Captivate licenses and invitations to live events. Now that you know a bit more about the Captivate interface, let’s take a look at the sample applications you will build in this book. These applications are designed to showcase almost every single feature of Captivate. Use them as a reference if there is something unclear while you are working through the exercises.

The first application that you will explore is a project that uses the screen capture feature of Captivate to create a screenshot-based course module:. Captivate generates a temporary file and opens it in the floating Preview pane. Follow the onscreen instructions to go through the project. This puts you in the same situation as a learner viewing this eLearning content for the first time.

This first sample project is called a Demonstration. As the name suggests, a demonstration is used to demonstrate something to the learner. Consequently, the learner is passive and simply watches whatever is going on. In a demonstration, the Mouse object is shown. It moves and clicks automatically. If the learners move their own mouse, it will not affect the content in any way.

This particular demonstration features some of the most popular Captivate objects, including Text Captions, Highlight Boxes, and Smart Shapes. The audio narration was generated by Captivate’s Text-To-Speech tool. We have simply typed the narration in the Slide Notes panel, and Captivate turned it into audio files using the voice of a predefined speech agent. Another popular feature in Adobe Captivate is the ability to add Closed Captions to the audio narration. This is one of the icons you’ll use the most during this book and when you design your courses.

It has seven options that control which part of the project you want to preview, and how you want to preview it. Note that each of these options is associated with a keyboard shortcut that will be different depending on the system you work on macOS or Windows. Place your mouse on top of each of the items to see the associated keyboard shortcut in a tooltip. Let’s now describe the options of the Preview icon in more detail:. You will now open another sample project.

Actually, it is not a real other project, but another version of the Encoder demonstration you worked with in the previous section:. This project is made of exactly the same slides and assets as the demonstration you saw in the previous section.

When the project reaches slide 3, it stops and waits for you to interact with the course. This is the main difference between a demonstration and a simulation. In Captivate, a simulation is a project where the learner is active.

In a simulation, the Mouse object is hidden, as learners use their own mouse to click around the screen and progress toward the end of the course. The fact that the students are active implies a new level of complexity; the learners can perform either the correct or the incorrect action.

In each case, the course must react accordingly. This concept is known as branching. This means that each student experiences the course module based on their own actions. This second sample file features pretty much the same Captivate objects as the demonstration you completed in the previous section. Both typing and mouse actions are replaced by interactive objects. These interactive objects can stop the course and wait for the learner to interact.

Using the interactive objects of Captivate will be covered in Chapter 5 , Developing Interactivity. Both the Encoder demonstration and simulation are based on the same screenshots. To create these sample courses, the first two steps of the production process described earlier were used:. Video Demo mode is a special recording mode of Captivate that is used to produce. These files can be uploaded to online services such as YouTube, Vimeo, or Daily Motion for playback on any device including the iPad, iPhone, and other internet-enabled mobile devices :.

First, note that a Video Demo project does not use the same. It uses the. This is the first indication that this project is going to behave differently than the other ones you have worked with so far. In addition to having a specific file extension, Video Demo projects also have their own unique interface, as shown in the following screenshot:. In the preceding screenshot, note the absence of the Filmstrip panel. A Video Demo project is not based on slides.

Actually, it is a single big video file. So the Filmstrip panel makes no sense in a Video Demo project. In a video file, interactions are not possible. The file can only be experienced from start to finish in the order defined by the teacher.

To use instructional design terminology, a video file gives a linear experience to the learner, while branch-aware interactive projects provide a nonlinear experience where a learner can make choices that change the way the course progresses. Therefore, interactive objects, quizzes, and branching are not available in a Video Demo project.

This sample application is very different from the projects you worked with so far because it is not based on screenshots or screen recording. The capture tool of Captivate was not used in this example. Instead, all the slides have been carefully crafted in Captivate.

For its audio narration, this project does not use text-to-speech. Instead, the narration was recorded and polished in an external audio application Adobe Audition, in this case and imported to the project. This course is also much more involved than the Encoder examples. Advanced Actions and Variables are used throughout the project to power the dynamic features, such as the name of the student appearing in the title of slide 4.

This course also features the certificate interaction at the very end only if you pass the Quiz! But the most impressive feature of this particular project is probably the Quiz , one of the most important and most popular tools in Captivate. The project contains seven Question Slides. Six of these are stored in the Question Pool. Each time the project is viewed, three questions are randomly chosen from the Question Pool and displayed to the student.

If you want to experiment with this feature, view the sample project a second time. Because we used the Question Pool to generate the questions, you should not be asked the same Quiz questions as when you first experienced the project. The next sample course you will see is not part of the download that comes with this book. Instead, you will use one of the sample applications that is included in Captivate.

Use the following steps to open it:. As shown in the following screenshot, you can access various sample files and tutorials right from the Welcome Screen of Captivate:. The project you just opened is a Responsive Project. This means that it can adapt itself to the screen it is viewed on. Note the extra toolbar at the top of the stage.

This extra toolbar lets you switch between different devices in order to check how the project is displayed on screens of different sizes. This action resizes the Stage to the size of an iPhone 6 px by px. As shown in the following screenshot, the elements of the current slide are rearranged to fit the new size of the Stage.

Some elements such as the big image that was on the right side of the stage have even been completely removed to accommodate the reduced screen real estate of a smartphone:. There are a lot of differences in the way you preview a Responsive Project, compared to the way you preview a non-responsive Captivate project:. That’s why you need a browser to preview the project. To make this project responsive, we have used Fluid Boxes to define the slide layouts for the different screen sizes.

The special previewing features of the Responsive Projects let you test the responsiveness of your project during the development phase, but they have one major disadvantage.

Because you preview the project using the default browser of your desktop or laptop computer, you can’t experience the course on an actual mobile device. New in Captivate is the ability to preview your project directly on your mobile device. This new feature is called Live Preview on Devices. This is the perfect way of ensuring that all the interactive objects you have used in your course module translate well on a touchscreen.

Use the following steps to test it out:. Captivate publishes a temporary file of the project in HTML5. When done, it opens the default web browser installed on the system and displays a big QR code. The Live Preview on Devices feature makes it incredibly easy and convenient to test your Responsive Projects on an actual mobile device!

Adobe Captivate has introduced a new type of project. You will now experience one such project using the following steps:. This is the reason why Captivate displays the project in your default web browser once it has finished publishing the preview. You should notice that the background image moves in the direction you drag it! Typical topics for such Virtual Reality courses include virtual tours, safety drills, first responder situations, crisis management, and so on.

B ut, of course, the sky is the limit, and your imagination that will ultimately define what Virtual Reality will be used for. This is the last sample project for you to experience before wrapping up this chapter.

Use the following steps to open and preview this project:. This project has been entirely developed in Microsoft PowerPoint and converted into a Captivate project using Captivate’s ability to import PowerPoint slides.

After viewing these sample applications, you should have a pretty good idea of the tools and general capabilities of Adobe Captivate. Those stumbling bocks are NOT in your basic training schedule at all. Will post in a separate comment, because it may be affected by moderator delay. Thank you for your feedback, Captivate is an amazing tool, that allows to build courses in various ways. I guess that is why the issues you have encountered differ from the ones we have seen. We have 12 years of experience with Captivate and lately have developed a template library with over templates that are used by thousands worldwide.

We actually got very positive user feedback from the first users of our Captivate school, mainly because we also give downloadable work file, so that everyone can watch a training video and play around with the file in their own pace. Thank you for this great resource and the exercise files! I will definitely be using them to practice. Thanks, Angela, see in the renewed portal that your comment was meant for me. Meanwhile i have uploaded three reference documents, one for each stumbling block.

We also appreciate that you have different views on what issues are most essential, and you have every right to share your views and knowledge in your posts. However, please stop using our Comments section to advertise your posts in an unnecessarily aggressive way. Was not helping you, but answering the original question. You can see now to which comment an new answer is pointing at. That was not possible before. You must be logged in to post a comment. Show All Notifications.

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Introduction to Captivate. Last updated 8/12/ Free troubleshooting resources include Adobe’s support knowledgebase, Adobe user-to-user forums and more. Create high-definition product demos with a new capture-as-a-video workflow. Preview them instantly and publish them to YouTube, social media (Twitter.