Newbie Questions

[Guest]

Hi All,

I have purchased and installed CP6 on my W7 based PC. trying to get my head around Captivate, it's much harder than Dreamweaver that I've been using for about 3 years. Please forgive me asking a lot of different questions on one discussion,

I'm the only developer so I'm wondering if I need to install a LMS such as Moofle on my PC or can I just install Moodle on my server and do all my testing online - this is how I develop web sites using DW and it works well for me.

I only see about 10 themes, is that correct or are more available somewhere else?

When I select File>New Project>Project from template there are no templates available, am I supposed to create my own? What's the difference between a template and a theme? Difficult to understand when I can't see at least one example...sigh.

When I select Play>Html5 output in web browser it shows correctly but goes through each slide in a few seconds, I couldn't find an option to "advance on click" for a presentation or even for a single slide.

I added a True/False quiz on the penultimate slide. When I give it the correct answer and "Submit" it confirms I gave the correct answer and gives me an option to "Continue" or "Review Quiz". When I select "Continue" it does nothing even though there is a slide after the quiz. Digging into this it looks like it added a Quiz Results page at the end of my presentation and skipped the slide that I added after the Quiz.

When I deliberately enter an incorrect value it says "try again", I go back and give the correct answer and "Submit" and it shows the quiz results page as "Failed", even though I gave the correct answer. Again, when I select "Continue it does nothing and stays on the "Quiz Results" page, again looks like it skipped the slide that followed the Quiz slide and went straight to the Quiz results slide at the end of the presentation.

Is there a good book or online tutorial that anyone can suggest for newbies? When I was learning Dreamweaver I found "Dreamweaver The Missing manual" by David Sawyer McFarland to be invaluable, unfortunately he hasn't published one for CP6 or even an earlier version of CP.

Thanks for any clues you can provide....

Tony

[RodWard]

I'll attempt to give you some quick answers:

• Install Moodle on your development PC only if you may need to do some testing while offline.  After ensuring that my standard settings will work somewhere early in a project, from then on I only test in the LMS once I've finished each module.  So you don't need it for 99% of your publishing.
• You are correct that Captivate 6 only ships with a limited number of themes.  More will probably come later as people use it more.
• You have to create your own template (save a project as CPTL format) in order to have it available to use as a starting point to spawn a new project.
• If you want each slide to pause and wait for a click to advance, add a click box or button to each slide and set the pause point of the object to be somewhere before the end of the slide.
• The Continue button on the Quiz Results slide will do whatever you have set the On Success or On Fail actions to be for the Quiz.  If you haven't set up any specific actions, then Continue will mean the playhead will continue to the next slide (if there is one).  Please note that the Quiz Results slide must be positioned AFTER any quiz questions or interactive objects set to report to the quiz.
• If you want to have multiple attempts at a quiz question, make sure you set the number of allowed attempts on the question itself.  You can also set a number of attempts for the entire quiz, but to reattempt the entire quiz you'll need to set the attempts number in Quiz Settings and select the option to Show Retake Button.
• Damian Bruyndonckx has just published a book on Captivate 6.  It's about the first one I've heard of.  http://dbr-training.eu/2012/08/mastering-adobe-captivate-6-by-packt-publishing/  Most of us just learned how to use the app by playing with it, reading the onlinen help, and asking questions on this forum.

[Guest]

Thanks Rod, that was very helpful. I really appreciate your time.

Tony

[Lilybiri]

Hi Tony,

I find Dreamweaver a lot more difficult than Captivate

No need to install LMS on your PC, you can better do testing on line.

Only 10 themes, you can create as many as you want yourself or edit existing themes (I always us Blank).

No templates; you can create templates. A theme is only meant for 'styles' really and it has settings for the master slides, skin editor and Object styles.

In a template you can have a theme applied, but also insert more objects like placeholders for all kind of objects, variables, advanced actions etc. 

The core of Captivate is the Timeline; that is why the timeline is available in all workspaces. If you do not pause a slide using a button or another interactive object, the play head will continue all the time. Default duration of a slide is 3 seconds, so that is probably what you see. This is a pretty old article I wrote about the timeline, but most of it is still valid for CP6 - except that now you have grouping possible:

http://lilybiri.posterous.com/tiny-timeline-tidbits

Have also a look at Allen's video about the timeline:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLqAqzFU3v4

There are a lot of youtube videos about Captivate 6, just google it.

On the official Adobe blog you'll find a whole bunch of webinars, and links to the recorded one of the past, available for free on demand. Here is one page with links http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/adobe-captivate-tutorials

As for books, CP was released only a couple of months ago. Recently Damien Bruyndonckx published a book http://www.packtpub.com/mastering-adobe-captivate-6/book

Kevin Siegel has published his manuals (look for Iconlogic).

Do not ask me to judge books, I never buy one for several reasons (do not need basics, and never find the advanced things I'm looking for in a book, so explore myself).

Lilybiri

[Guest]

Thanks Lily, that was very helpful. I'll work through the links you provided also. Thanks again for your time.

Tony