Multi level outline in Presenter

[Guest]

Hi,

Is it possible to create a multi leve outline in Adobe Presenter courses?

I'd like to create some chapters so that the slides would be more organized.

[Guest]

Hey Tomas,

Actually you can create multi-level navigation in Presenter, however, the workaround takes some getting used to.  In previous versions of Breeze/Presenter, all you had to do was modify the Slide Properties for each slide; simply add some spaces and you were good to go.

Not anymore.

As most folks have noted (do a search in these forums for other threads), simply adding spaces to the slide titles via the Slide Properties dialog box doesn't work anymore (and adding spaces to the titles directly on the slide itself doesn't work either).  The only solution that I've come across is to modify the viewer.xml file once Presenter finishes it's publishing process.

If you open up the viewer.xml file in Notepad, Textpad or some other non-formatting application, look for the following tag/node structure:

<slideTitle>Welcome!</slideTitle>

Add spaces using your keyboard's spacebar to tweak the <slideTitle> node as such:

<slideTitle>     Welcome!</slideTitle>

Save and close the viewer.xml doc and re-run the Presenter content....your outline panel will now show indented titles!

Hope that helps!

Rob

[ziquiel]

Can you remove slide titles this way by removing them?  The thing that gets me most is that it seems to be all slides shown or no outline.

Mike

[Guest]

Hi Mike!

Actually, that's a really good question!  I just tried eliminating the slide titles by removing the text between the <slideTitle> nodes and then re-ran a sample course that I quickly put together.

Here's the deal: even after removing the titles in the viewer.xml file, Presenter made sure that something still displays in the outline panel.  What happened is that "Slide 1", "Slide 2" and so on appeared in my outline panel, even though I removed the title information in the xml document.

Rob

http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

[ziquiel]

Rob,

I was thinking only removing 50% of my slides from the Outline in the presentation.

So I moved it to Captivate while I got OK TOC control...but ran into a small problem...No Attachment capability.

If they could blend the two products better they would have a real winner.

Mike

[Guest]

Boy do I hear you there Mike!

If Presenter incorporated a TOC in the same fashion that Captivate does, then we'd have an easier time configuring presentations especially if you're faced with a lesson or module that's got a ton of slides built into it.

I recently finished a project for a client that contained nearly 120 slides; and with a "simple" request to "chapterize" the content (although totally do-able) it means that you have to do some homework in order to pull it off.

Can be done...and I've done it many times...but man I'd sure LOVE to have a more streamlined way to deal with it!!!!

And while I'm on this rant, let me just say this: hidden slides are NOT necessarily your friend!  Unless you're watching your slide counts, you could easily trip up your LMS and end up w/ inaccurate completions.

Rob

http://www.robrode.com/yabb/

[Guest]

I've found that in viewer.xml,  for each slide you dont want to see, set change showInTOC="" to showInTOC="false"

This will mean that it doesnt show up in the Table of Contents -

However the really irritating thing is that the text in the unshown slide titles cant be searched through either. (it cant find them)

I'd ideally like to just have a clickable TOC on the first slide or something - not sure if you can do that, though.

(Im using Presenter version 7.0)

[Tech_Research]

Have you tried using the "Hide Slide" functionality within powerpoint? This hides the slide within the TOC...but I'm not sure if it lets you search for hidden slides.  I'm assuming not. 

As far as a TOC on the first slide...you could create hyperlinks on your first slide to all of the hidden slides...or, for something fancier, perhaps mock up a picture of a TOC in Photoshop, place it in your powerpoint and create hyperlinks, using shapes.  The only thing to note is that for you to test hyperlinks outside the project, presenter needs to be published on a server (that's how it works for me anyways...we place it on our QA server first to test links and then place into production).

Good Luck!

[Mia-M-SI]

I really can't believe that you can't prevent a slide from showing up in the Presenter Outline, even now in Presenter 8.

ADOBE STAFF: PLEASE CONSIDER ADDING AN OPTION IN THE SLIDE MANAGER FOR EACH SLIDE THAT LETS THE USER CHOOSE WHETHER OR NOT TO SHOW THE SLIDE IN THE OUTLINE/TOC PANEL (YES--I'M SHOUTING!!!!!).

This should not be a difficult thing to do -- it makes no sense that you can do this in the viewer.xml file (what I'm doing now to get around the problem -- thanks, geematic!).