Animating bullet points on a single slide

[JohnAC]

I have a slide with 4 bullet points on.

How do I progress the bullets by clicking play and having the slide automatically advance to reveal the next bullet and pause before showing the bullet after that.  Like you would build in Keynote or PowerPoint

I can do this over 4 individual slides but that seems ridiculous in this day and age.

Please help.

Many Thanks

John

[Lilybiri]

You can stagger the captions on  the timeline and add click boxes (staggered as well). What you are asking for is typical for a presentation tool, I try to avoid bullets as much as possible for eLearning.

[JohnAC]

Thanks for that amazingly swift reply Lilybiri.

A click box for each bullet?

Am I not able to utilise the main navigation buttons at the bottom?

[Lilybiri]

Well, you need the pausing points of the click boxes. I never use the playbar, and do the staggering when I have to present somewhere which as a crazy CP-fan I never do using PPT but always using Captivate. Click box can even cover all the slide, which means you advanced just by clicking on the slide. Play button on the navigation bar should release the playhead as well.

[JohnAC]

OMG LB, I am now about 7 hours into trying to get this ONE slide to work - its killing me!!  I have used Adobe products InDesign, PS and AI extensively for nearly two decades and I consider myself an advanced user but AC seem like a nightmare in comparison.  I am only on the AC trial at the moment but boy is it clunky and unintuitive - I am making progress I think!!!

On your advice I learnt how to do a custom Navigation, I now have one that IS working.  WOW!  Feels like more luck than judgment to be honest.

• I have 4 separate text Captions each grouped with a small graphic representing the bullet and jpeg image.  So 4 separate groups, each containing a bullet, text and image.
• Each group is staggered at 2 sec intervals, with a .5 sec fade in and each runs until the end of the slide.
• The Click Box 'pause points' in place and working - thank you!
• At each of the four Pauses I need the Play/Pause button in the custom Nav to show the Play Button.  Currently if I use the buttons to play and pause normally, it displays the appropriate one, but when the 'Pause Points' are reached it pauses ok but shows the Pause button in the main nav. so you have to click it twice to start playing.  Is there any way to add an action to the four Click box 'Pause Points' that would cause the Pause/Play button state to change to the Pause State.

I have tried adding an 'On Success' Execute Advanced Action and having this as the action called PausePoint:

Hide btnPause

Show btnPlay

I hope you are around today to save my computer from me and me from hell!!

Many thanks

---

John

[Lilybiri]

Maybe you should take some training for Captivate or at least buy a (good) book? I'm sure to be able to realize what you want in less than 15 minutes...for more than 1 slide.

Toggle Shape buttons - Captivate 6 - Captivate blog

Custom Play/Pause button in Captivate - Captivate blog

[JohnAC]

Thanks for your help.

Of course I wouldn't dream of using this level of software without some training.  My first port of call before I even signed up for the trial was Lynda.com.  I subscribe to that site and have always been impressed with their work. I did over 5 hours with 'Adobe Captivate 8 Essential Training'  and 'Captivate Projects: Mobile and Responsive Design'  I then revisited them after I started the trial and have been revisiting then frequently for the past two days. Good courses I thought!

There are all sort of bugs in AC8 that are both frustrating and surprising for a mature piece of software...I guess its probably just me with unreasonably high expectations.  Manually scrolling the timeline often does not give a true representation of the slides progress...reordering timeline layers often leaves the layer names in the wrong order, allocated to the wrong layer - with the need to select another slide and then select the original to correct the layer names. Layers also sometimes jump when moving them.  Grouping objects is a very unpredictable operation - these are just a few of the more frequent frustrations.

The inability to on the fly test in different browsers...? :-0

No .ai or even .svg import...pretty unbelievable...astonishing even!  AI is part of the Adobe Family - How wonderful would this be for Smart Shapes instead of the basic array of tools AC provides.

Symbol type libraries for commonly used items

I could go on but I don't want to bore you and in truth I expect, being such a new user, I am getting much of this wrong and missing where to control these issues.

Doing a simple PowerPoint type presentation that I can export to HTML5, with a bit of user interaction I expected to be a walk in the park for AC...but its actually a very intricate process...maybe I should go back Hype3 Pro, a good HTML5 application...but Its a much lower level of app I love to learn to use industry standard software.  The must be a reason AC has such a dedicated user-base.

I am however, terrifically grateful to you for taking the me to try and help me.

I'll re-start my efforts again in the morning when my stress level have returned to something around normal!

---

John

[Lilybiri]

John, I'm a big fan of Lynda.com , use it daily. But I don't find their Captivate courses to be of the level I expect based on the way other Adobe application courses do offer real expert advice. Sorry about that, regret it very much. You'll not find anything about labeling, themes and theme colors, good practice and shared actions are not mentioned. Those courses are very basic, just offering some recipes, no real advice as I see from other Lynda authors for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat... After all that is the case with a lot of other Captivate training as well, mostly done by people who never developed real courses and for whom time saving nor good practice is important.

Until version 6 Captivate was only bitmap, shapes appeared and have a (too slow) evolution. I was the first to ask for SVG import, and crossing my fingers that it will happen soon. I always imported AI, by putting them as a smart object in Photoshop, because Captivate has a fine roundtripping work flow with Photoshop.

I know about that annoying timeline messing up bug, seems to happen less for me in CP8. For responsive projects you can test with Edge Inspect on all devices, without having to publish the project. There was no need for testing in all browsers since Flash player was standardized, now with HTML5 jungle you are right that this could be welcome addition.

Manually scrolling the timeline is never a good idea to see how the course will look, there is no temporary published file create at all. You can compare it with viewing something without rendering in other applications. Use the real Preview modes (not Play Slide) or even better Preview in Browser or in HTML Browser (F12 or F11).

You can simply import a PPT presentation, each slide will be converted to a movie slide while keeping every animation, timing and if set up like that the clicking to advance the slide. I know that I'm repeating the same thing over and over again: PPT is not an eLearning tool, whatever others may think about it. The most crazy thing about PPT (MS has a lot of such features) is that you have to specify the size in printing units (in or cm) for a tool that is meant to be used with screens or beamers where the basic unit is the pixel.

[CaptivEd]

I feel your pain, John.

Importing PPTs into Captivate is problematic for numerous reasons. For example, none of the objects come over and go into the library...they all embedded in the background of the slides.

If you get frustrated, as did I, trying to get PPT content to work well after an import, someone helpful person in the forums will likely suggest you just use Captivate for your authoring instead....fair enough. But then, Captivate does not have some of the most basic presentation-type features...like, as you mentioned, animating a bulleted list of text, so that the bullets come in/go out one at a time. Bulleted lists, though often abused, do have their place in eLearning...especially if you can animate the bullets in synchronized to other objects like images.

Even formatting features...you cannot effectively control the spacing in a text caption with bullets. You can control spacing to some degree, but nothing close to the sophistication of other types of apps like presentation or word processing. Not asking that Captivate be either of those types of apps, but some functionality would be expected.

I have an animated bulleted list that I did in PowerPoint...because of the above, to reproduce with the same functionality in CP, I will (unless I am missing something) have to create a separate "text caption" for each bullet and its text, and then time and animate each one separately. And there is no "Fade" animation in CP....you must go into the Timing Properties and set a transition an object to fade in or fade out.

OK...rant over!

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

If you wanted to fade bullets in, it's pretty simple to achieve.

I would do it as follows:

Insert a Transparent Text Caption with the full bulleted list.

Then overlay that caption with a few different Highlight Boxes or Shapes that were configured to match the background. Then one by one cause the shapes to fade out to reveal the bullets.

I'm sure one of the other regulars will be along any moment now to advise how ridiculous my own approach would be and advise that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO Is...

Cheers... Rick

[RodWard]

You pretty much took the words out of my mouth Rick.

I was also thinking that Captivate does all of the things that Ed was saying.  It's just that it doesn't do it in the same way.

Honestly, each authoring app has it's own approach and I don't see anything wrong with the way Captivate does these things.  If an e-learning developer prefers one tool over another, that's their personal decision.

[CaptivEd]

"I was also thinking that Captivate does all of the things that Ed was saying.  It's just that it doesn't do it in the same way."

It comes down to ease and efficiency of doing things, which translates to the time it takes...and time = money, as we know. If application A takes 30 seconds to set something up and application B takes 30 minutes to accomplish the same thing, one might conclude that app A does it better in that regard. That doesn't mean that app A is better than app B overall.

Honestly, each authoring app has it's own approach and I don't see anything wrong with the way Captivate does these things.  If an e-learning developer prefers one tool over another, that's their personal decision.

Sure, we all prefer some tools over others, and we all make personal decisions. But there are a lot of tools out there. I may prefer to use a saw to cut a piece of paper in half, but scissors may be a better tool.

I'm sure you use more than just Captivate for eLearning creation. Photoshop? Audio editing software? PowerPoint is actually a pretty robust and mature authoring app -- I use it a lot for that and then insert the modified objects into Captivate (and Storyline, when I was using that last year).

[RodWard]

Yes I do use a number of authoring tools when creating e-learning for clients.  Captivate is just one of them.  So I DO understand the differences and that some tools have features others lack.  I agree that one tool may be better than another for certain situations.  Try doing on screen synchronised Closed Captioning in Storyline for example.  Captivate does it much better.

However, over the years I have found that when you REALLY know a tool and how to use it, then you tend to find that it can do a lot more than most users realise.  Setting up bullet points to animate in Captivate doesn't take that much more time to do than in PowerPoint.  And I MUCH prefer the way Captivate does it (as separate slide objects) because I need to usually synchronize the bullet points to arrive on slide exactly at the moment I am talking about them in the voiceover.  In Captivate I can do this VERY easily just by dragging the starting point of the object on the timeline, and this is easy to do because I can SEE the waveform of the voiceover and pick exactly where the new sentence or phrase begins.  In PowerPoint I need to carefully configure the timing in dialogs in a much more trial and error fashion. 

So, I see it has more or less a 'horses for courses' argument. Adding an animated bulleted list in PowerPoint might be slightly quicker because you're only dealing with a single text container, whereas Captivate requires you to add them separately (or duplicate the first one multiple times).  And ticking a box in PowerPoint to make the bullets animate when the user clicks is certainly quicker than adding click boxes to the Captivate slide to pause the timeline at intervals.  But then if you're creating the kind of courses I typically do with voiceover accompanied by animations on slide, then timing and synchronising these objects is much easier in Captivate.  Horses for courses.

Yes I agree wholeheartedly that PowerPoint is a robust and mature authoring app...for presentations.  But it's not an e-learning authoring application.  That's why many other applications such as Lectora, Articulate Studio, and Articulate Storyline gained a foothold in this industry by leveraging off PowerPoint, either as plugins, or by using a clone of its interface (as Storyline does).  Many users are very familiar with PowerPoint and therefore find tools that use its interface (or resemble it) to be intuitive.

For the record, I've never understood why Microsoft could not see PowerPoint's potential to become an e-learning authoring tool and just add the necessary functionality that so many other companies like Articulate did.  Had Microsoft done that years ago when PPT was new, I think they could have cornered the e-learning market the same way they did for other markets covered by Excel and MS Word.

[Lilybiri]

Rod MS tried several times to get into eLearning, but for some reasons this always failed.

[RodWard]

Yes I know. I used to download each product they brought out and try them to see if they were worth using...but they weren't.

But as far as I can recall, none of these products were based on PowerPoint.  Microsoft always seemed to try to reinvent the wheel with another DIFFERENT application for e-learning, when all along PowerPoint was just sitting there right under their noses.  With PPT they already had a world-class interface that did most of what they needed already.  They just needed to add the ability to create quizzing, and publish for SCORM.

That's about all that other apps like Lectora and Articulate were doing. It baffles me that a company that already dominated the world in office software didn't see this.  But maybe it's BECAUSE they dominated their chosen niche that they didn't see it. Oh well...

[Lilybiri]

Here is my bad character: look at the MS tutorials, you'll understand why eLearning is not their 'thing'. Sorry! Must say that I'm glad they didn't conquer this section, because they already killed excellent spreadsheet, presentation and word processing applications. Still miss a lot of features in Word, Powerpoint and Excel that I had at my fingertips in the 1990's.

[RodWard]

But Lieve, you also complain about Adobe's online help too, don't you?  And they've done OK to get where they are.

I used to be a Technical Writer and wrote a lot of online help for software companies I worked for in a previous life.  I no longer believe anyone reads the online help unless they have no other alternative.  Most people Google for answers or get people like you and me to answer their endless questions on the forums.

[Lilybiri]

I was not talking about the Help, which is now crap everywhere, but about the 'tutorials' that MS used to offer; I had a lot of fun with my students to find out all the bugs in those.

[CaptivEd]

Good points, Rod. I like how you described synching the objects to the waveforms.

As we know, it's competitive out there for authoring apps, as for all things technical (hardware and software). Apple makes an iPhone, other companies scrutinize and deconstruct and say "how can we do it better? We'll make it bigger and add some new features and capabilities." Then Apple plays catch-up and makes their phones bigger and adds the same features (I love my iPad and also have a Samsung phone...not trying to start a debate on that).

To me, a lot of what makes a compelling presentation makes compelling eLearning. In fact there are animations in PPT that I would really not think of using when giving a live presentation that work great with on-screen presentations and courses. I worked in an Articulate shop last year and was pretty shocked to see how Storyline, though slide-based like CP and PPT, had such poor animation and formatting options relative to PPT. CP 8 is better than Storyline in that regard, but still well behind PPT for those options. For that reason and others, I often preferred to use Presenter, which is a plug-in to PPT but is eLearning software.

So my point is there is progress to be made in eLearning apps in general to give more options for animation and formatting. Of course, not too long ago you used Flash (still can) to create all kinds of slick animation and insert it into your eLearning. Now that Flash is "obsolete", not so much, and with rapid eLearning, one does not want to have to use a separate app if not necessary.

I look forward to approaching your level of expertise in CP....I used it exclusively in the CP3/4 days for video demos, then went to an Articulate shop for 3 years, now back with CP8.

Thanks for you input and I look forward to learning a lot from you and others here.

[CaptivEd]

Rick, thanks. That was actually my first go at a solution. I think the one I ended up with, as described, is better.