Captivate 5.5 Buttons and Jump To Slide Not Working

[Guest]

I have a home slide where users can choose from 10 state-specific training options.  There are 178 slides in the total presentation.  When I open the presentation fresh a couple of the buttons work and jump to the correct state.  One button jumps to a different slide than what is defined and the rest of the buttons do not work at all.  If I select one of the buttons that works then return to the beginning of the presentation all the buttons work fine.  The problem occurs when I open a fresh copy of the published presentation from my hard drive.  The buttons are all active and there is no click box on the slide - you need to click on one of the state buttons to continue past the initial slide.  I cannot understand why this is not working or why everything works fine when I return to the home slide from somewhere else in the presentation.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thank you.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

My own guess is that at first the presentation isn't fully loaded. So clicking a button tries to visit a slide that simply isnt' there yet.

Perhaps try enabling the preloader and configuring it to 100%?

Cheers... Rick

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[KSHNewBenefits]

My experience with Captivate and "jump to" buttons is that they work... sometimes. It's hit or miss. I can have a button that will work fine. Then, it stops working. I look at the settings, everything is just as it should be. I'll close out the project, open it back up the next day, and the buttons are working. Others are not. It's very random. And annoying. I don't know a fix. Other than they just miraculously start working on their own.

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

Buttons may seem a bit hit and miss and may be daunting with all the Active VS Inactive timeline bits and all. But I've really never known them to totally fail or be all that random.

Things to consider with Buttons.

What does the button do?

As I explained in my earlier reply, if a button is programmed to jump to a slide a lot farther down the track, and that portion of the track hasn't yet arrived from the server, this could well be an issue.

Another thing that can affect whether a button operates as you wish is if you are trying to jump to a slide that is beyond a Question slide (or a slide being treated as a Quiz slide) and your Quiz settings are configured so that each question must be answered before you may proceed. Captivate will disallow visiting a slide beyond the first unanswered question.

Sometimes a Button is configured to open a URL or a file. And it works fine during preview within Captivate, but fails after you publish. This is most often an issue with Flash Security Settings blocking the action and is described at the link below:

Click here to view

Hopefully this sheds some light on the situation.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcerStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[RodWard]

I agree with Rick that the most likely cause of your issue is that the file hasn't finished loading and that's why the buttons don't seem to work.  But there is also another wrinkle.

Even once a Captivate SWF has completely loaded down to the user's machine, if you click a button on one of the first slides (e.g. slide 1 or 2)  that is pointing to a slide a long way down the slide order (e.g. slide 100 or 150) then there will likely be a sizeable delay before that button will work because Captivate has to 'render' all of the content between the starting slide and the target slide before it will show it.

People often think that Captivate slides are like a collection of web page and that if you jump to another slide it' just like jumping to another web page in a website.  But Captivate actually works much more like a video movie.  Jumping from one slide to another is like fast-forwarding the movie.  Captivate has to run through all the slides in between, even though you don't see them.  If there are scores or hundreds of slides in your movie, then this can take some time, and while it is happening it might appear as though the button has stopped working.

I first noticed this issue when a client was using our Hyperlink Widget to create glossary links to terms in a large Captivate project.  They thought the widget wasn't working because they would click a hyperlink on some slides and nothing would happen for almost a minute.  What we found was that the developer had placed all of the glossary slides right at the end of the project file.  This meant that if the end user clicked a glossary hyperlink on one of the early slides, Captivate was trying to render out all of the slides in the entire movie before it could show the glossary definition on the slide at the end.  All we had to do to 'fix' the issue was place the glossary slides near the front of the slide queue and use OnSlideExit actions to jump over them so that they were not encountered accidentally by the user.  Once the glossary slides were rendered out, clicking any of the glossary hyperlinks resulted in an immediate response.

It's obvious from your inserted screencapture that you have a very large branched project.  You may need to give some careful consideration to how you set up the order of slides so as to improve response times.

[Guest]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the tip on jumping to a slide beyond a question slide.  Years later, it even helped with my troubleshooting while bringing a Captivate 5 project into 7.  In my case, it was not a question slide, but rather, a slide with a click box with score assigned to it.  Captivate just wont let me jump beyond that slide.

Thanks so much!

[Guest]

I checked and the pre-loader is set to 100% and the quiz is set to optional.  I still don't understand how the buttons will not work when I first open the presentation then work instantly and processes the jumps with no delays after I pass the initial screen and return to the beginning of the presentation.  It seems like some kind of program functionality issue.  I am also running the presentation from my local hard drive so there is no network latency to deal with.  All my buttons are configured to jump to a slide within the presentation - none are set to open URLs or files.  Stumped.

[SteveNixonCW]

Try naming the slide and navigating by name not slide number.

[Lilybiri]

Same question as in the other thread? I agree that labeling slides is a good practice and makes creating navigation easier, but for Captivate nothing changes if you navigate to a slide identified by its number or by its label? Please, explain! Perhaps I'm missing something important.

Lilybiri

[AndyKingInOC]

I think rod explained it pretty well above.

Strangely, I have a simiarly set up activity but haven't experienced what you're describing.  I have 77 slides total, The menu is on slide 4 with 5 menu choices.  If I jump to slide 51 immediately there's no delay so I wonder what the difference is. 

The slides in your branching view screenshot don't look that graphically complex. 

Are you using master slides for the slides in your branches?

Do the slides have audio?

[RodWard]

In the example of the project that I was talking about before, the author had litterally hundreds of objects in the project.  So although I think from memory he had less than 200 slides he had so many objects for Captivate to render and calculate that it was dragging its feet when he clicked a link to go to a slide near the end.

So it's not necessarily how many slides you have that makes the difference.  The other factor is also how complex and busy those slides happen to be.

[Guest]

The deck is pretty straightforward.  All text and simple quiz slides.  There is no animation, video or audio.  The user selects the state they are working in from from 10 options on the main slide and is then supposed to jump to the state specific set of slides, review those, then answer three questions.  All the quizzes dump out to the same results slide and summary.  I am not using any master slides.  I'm still confused why the presentation works 100% correctly when you return to the home page after moving past the main slide for the first time but not when you initially load the presentation.

[AndyKingInOC]

disregarding how it looks in the branching view..

if you jump from slide 1 to slide 2 does it behave the same if you jump from slide 1 to slide ~70?

I asked about master slides as it might help decrease the file size/load time if you created a master slide that has the same white/blue background you're using.  I'll admit I'm just shooting in the dark here.

Im curious also, was this originally imported from powerpoint?

[Guest]

I imported this from Powerpoint and inserted the quiz slides in Captivate.  Three of the 10 buttons on the main slide work fine.  The others do not respond when I click on them initially.  After I click on one of the other seven and get no action then I select a different button of the seven it does not jump to the slide it should go to but just moves on to slide 2 in the deck.  If I restart the presentation (not reload it from my hard drive) all ten of the buttons work exactly as they should and jump quickly and properly to the correct slide.

[RodWard]

Looking at your original post I can see that the menu slide appears to be the very first slide in the project file.

Try adding a short blank slide BEFORE the menu slide. Say 1 or 2 seconds in duration.  I'm wondering if your issue is related to having too many objects on the initial slide.

[Joe@Majiq]

I had a similar problem. My click box would correctly jump to a previous slide, but the audio from the old slide would continue playing. In the end, I had to duplicate the destination slide, and then delete the previous version. Then I had to update all my click boxes. It works fine now.

Edit: I take that back. Duplicating the destination slide would work for a while, then it stopped. However, I did find that if I set the click box to Stop Slide Audio When Clicked, things seemed to work pretty well.

[Frances_Weber]

I have a similar issue where I have a main menu with 5 buttons. Each button jumps to another slide within the project however when I publish the file sometimes the buttons work and sometimes they don't. I went to try and see if I had fixed the issue but when you close the file and open it again it will be one of those guess which button doesn't work this time. It's terribly frustrating and I don't know what to do to fix it. I tried naming the buttons and the slides. I tried copying the file into a new project (same issue). There are no quizzes it's just a main menu where a learner can either select a demo or click the button to go to the simulation. It worked fine for the longest time then suddenly it stopped working???

[AndyKingInOC]

Hi Frances,

Without looking at your project or timeline, I have a couple guesses:

1) it could be what Rod Ward describes above with the slides having to render before you can get to them.  Again, total guess.

2) it could be a timeline problem.  If you're using buttons, they generally have an active section, a pause, followed by an inactive section.  If the playhead advances into the inactive state of a button, it won't work, even if the playhead is paused.

[Suz19801234]

hey,

did anyone get a fix for this as i am having the exact same issue with my project!! i have tried everything and am really starting to get annoyed with it!

thanks

sue

[Lilybiri]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

Shouldn't you start a new thread?  And could you explain in detail what is the issue? Are the buttons not functional after publishing or during Preview? If it is Preview, which one did you use?

Lilybiri

[athniel]

Hi Lily

I had similar problems, but your mention of preview type gave me a clue. The buttons stopped functioning during Preview from Slide (F8). So I tried Preview Project (F4) - buttons worked fine. They also worked fine in published output. So, Preview from Slide seems to be the problem - at  least for me. Hope this helps someone.

[Lilybiri]

Using F8 will render only the slides from the current slide on, so it is logical that you cannot use buttons that navigate to slides before the current slide

[athniel]

Hi Lily

I was previewing navigation from the slide. F8 wasn't being used to preview navigation to that slide from previous slides. The button just wouldn't move on from that slide. As all F8 previews until that slide were fine, I suspect it may also involve Captivate's prerendering needs as suggested by Rod - although I have less than 20 slides so far and there are no 'complex' objects alongside text beyond a few click boxes and buttons so far! It could also be PC issues as well, who knows? It's a strange one, but whatever safely works.

[accamerer]

Just for the record....was having the same VERY FRUSTRATING problem. Yes, if your quiz is set to Pass Required, it will not jump past the quiz. (I swear this was not the case in 5.5 but would have to test that assumption) Simply move your Help/Reference, etc. slides BEFORE your quiz and adjust the next/back buttons to skip those slides as you come to them in the presentation. This is one problem that needs to have an error pop-up window alerting you to SOMETHING - not just a non-functioning click. If there is a reason the software is not doing something that is obvious to the software's internal logic - it should TELL us. At least Flash has a cryptic error system instead of nothing.

[BobPinch]

I know this post is a bit old.  But I was having a similar issue and I found my fix from another similar thread.  My quiz scope was preventing my jump to slide from working.  Essentially the quiz scope ends in your deck on the last slide that has a scorable field.  Captivate 5 doesnt allow you to jump beyond that point from eariler in the deck.  Ex:  My menu was on slide 4.  I had a single scorable click box (for LMS SCORM reasons) on slide 75.  And my last menu item was trying to jump to slide 76.  I found I could not jump to anything beyond 75.  I Simply moved the scorable object to slide 76 (or could have been even further out as needed), and its working again.