HI there

As you have seen, if you hide a slide in Captivate, it's not like hiding one in PowerPoint. Hidden slides aren't produced in the Captivate output, so you cannot jump to them.

If you want a slide available in Captivate but only seen by a jump, you will need to use Variables and Advanced Actions to prevent the user from casually browsing to the slide. Upon attempting to enter the slide, an Advanced Action would check the variable to see if entering is allowed. If so, the slide is viewed. If not, a different slide is presented.

Cheers... Rick

I'm not a programmer either, but Advanced actions and variables are not the 'real stuff', lot easier to handle but also less powerful. My blog is dedicated mostly to those advanced actions.

If you could explain bit more detailed, or confirm what I understood from your post, I'll try to explain step by step:

• If the user is on slide 1, but doesn't click the button, he has to be navigated to slide 3
• if the user is on slide 1, but does click a button, he has to be navigated to slide 2
• if the user gets to slide 2 because of the button, afterwards he continues to slide 3

You will have to turn off the playbar, because the Next button on the playbar will always go to the physically next slide. To achieve this, use the On Enter action for slide 1 and Assign the value 0 to the system variable cpCmndShowPlaybar (that variable is available in the dropdown list after you choose Assign).

If my description is correct, you do not need advanced actions nor variables. Just this:

1. Set the On Exit action for the slide to 'Go to Next Slide', or to 'Continue'; this can be done in the Actions accordion of the Properties panel for that slide
2. Set the On Success action for the button to 'Jump to Slide 3';

FYI: here are two articles where I introduced using variables:

Using power of variables without advanced actions

Unleashing power of variables with advanced actions

Lilybiri

Yes that is correct, but the user will see on the playbar that a slide was skipped, on the progress bar. If that doesn't matter, this is a perfect solution indeed.

Lieve

Turning off the playbar via the Skin Editor means that your project will not be published with a playbar at all.

Using the variable means you can control whether or not (and when) the published playbar is visible to the user.