Captivate 7 - Limit to objects on a slide?

[idladytiger]

Hi --

I am building a 'help manual resource' for an elearning project. This help manual is located on one slide and contains 232 objects, half of which are text boxes and the other half are buttons to show or hide those text boxes. When I attempt to preview this slide or publish the content, Captivate sticks at 15% and I watch my RAM get gobbled up until it maxes out at 99%. My IT guy dropped another 8GB into my machine but that just gives it more to gobble. I feel like I have asked Captivate to do too much because when I drag the text group off the slide, it publishes or previews super fast. I even tried dragging a few items off and had to drag at least 20 text boxes off the slide.

Is there an object limit? I have not mapped out all the advanced interactions yet because I found this issue when I went to test drive the very first interaction. Maybe they need to be mapped for Captivate to behave as expected? I have created similar help resource manuals that are fairly hefty but I do believe this one is the biggest, but only by about 10 objects. My file size is only 3557 kb.

Thank you in advance for your help. I've attached images for a better visual.

[Lilybiri]

I think indeed that you are having too many 'actions' on the slide. Are those advanced actions? In that case, please replace them by shared actions (seems to be less heavy). Do you use variables? Of course I could be wrong, but I suspect it is not the number of objects that is causing you issues, but the way the slide has been set up.

A workaround could be to spread over more than one slide, properly set up the user experience shouldn't be that different from this one big slide.

[idladytiger]

Hi --

Thanks for your help!

I haven't done anything with the actions just yet. I have only built all the objects. Simply by dragging 15 or 20 text boxes off the screen it stops freezing on preview / publish. In fact, I found the freeze when I was testing my first advanced action. No variables with this one, just showing / hiding of objects to produce a book-like experience. I am building my actions right now and the only way to preview them to make sure they are functioning as expected is to keep 20 text boxes dragged off the screen.

For the user experience, I want my learners to be able to access this help manual from any screen and have it return them to the screen they were on once they are done (so the continue button says return to last slide visited right now). I did try to spread them out (it did work as far as not freezing) but I ended up not being able to return directly to the content slide. I had the main page of the help manual direct them to the different subsections. Each subsection can return to the help manual but then it can no longer return them to the previous content slide. It might sound confusing.

I built another help manual that was for a different topic but ran the same way only it contained 206 objects instead of 232. I tried moving just as many buttons off the screen but it did not have the same result as moving 20 text boxes off the screen. Only one text box is set to be visible at the start. The rest are all hidden until they are activated.

It feels like that silly saying "You have come to the end of the internet". "I have come to the end of Captivate!"

[idladytiger]

Thanks again for your help. I did end up just doing a workaround. It is not ideal and a bit frustrating simple text bogs things down, but having accepted the program limitations I came up with a mini menu to let the user choose their section. That way they would still be returned to the page they were on.

Thanks again for your help and your response! If you happen to come across any documentation that specifies the limits on objects on a slide, feel free to update that here. If not, I am assuming the magic number is around 213.

[Lilybiri]

OK, if I find it, will post.