Toolbox Tip: Unique Features in Adobe Captivate 7

Fri Jun 07 2013

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Toolbox Tip: Unique Features in Adobe Captivate 7-e6285f9934799362ab3ba6ada0c3192831486e2281a7991851239fba51b9aa3c

Learner Notes

Captivate 7 comes with a new Smart Interaction that enables the learner to take notes in the course. Students can take notes on a slide-by-slide basis to use as reference while participating in the course. (Feature request: be able to create and print a summary when they are done!)

Toolbox Tip: Unique Features in Adobe Captivate 7-2f73bb0413660cfed57c7755fbfef7f06bd0c3aaa47b32c552952d354ff85b2d

App Packager

Adobe Captivate App Packager is a separate application that is installed with Captivate. With the App Packager, you can take an HTML5-pbulished Captivate project, embed other HTML5 animations (such as those created with Adobe Edge Animate), and package the project in Adobe Phone Gap as a native app for multiple platforms. You do need to purchase Adobe Phone Gap, though.

Toolbox Tip: Unique Features in Adobe Captivate 7-226c953038afc6f5ab0e58c16a92a4e6bf5bb48143ed89ae4ce5156102935c21

It seems like the major authoring tools are becoming more and more similar. When one has a great new feature, it seems like the others follow suit in their next version. Adobe has just released Captivate 7, and many of the new features are things you can do in other tools already, such as YouTube embedding, web objects, tab order, right-to-left languages, equations, and so forth. The new release does, however, have a number of new features that you won’t find in many of the other authoring tools.

Shared Actions

In Captivate 7, you can set up and save advanced actions that you can use over again. You could already reuse an advanced action multiple times in a single project in Captivate. But there are two advantages to the new Shared Actions feature:

Even though you are reusing an action, you can customize some of the parameters each time you use that action. For example, on a time and attendance course where some of the content applies only to supervisors, you can set up an advanced action that has content branch to slide 4 if the learner is a supervisor and slide 9 if the learner is not. You can then reuse that same action later in the course, but make quick changes to branch to slides 15 and 20 (instead of 4 and 9).
You can export these shared actions and then import them into different projects.

Because they can be reused within a project and across projects, yet still be flexible enough to adjust to specific situations, this new feature is a big time saver.

About the Author

Diane Elkins

Diane Elkins is the co-founder of Artisan Learning, a custom learning design company. She has built a reputation as a national e-learning expert by being a frequent speaker at major industry events for organizations such as ATD, The Learning Guild, Training Magazine, and ASAE. She is also the co-author of the popular E-Learning Uncovered book series as well as E-Learning Fundamentals: A Practical Guide from ATD Press. She is a past chair of the Professional Development Advisory Council for the American Society of Association Executives and a past board member of the Northeast Florida and Metro DC chapters of ATD. She is also a founding board member of Inspire Accessibility, a consortium of learning providers looking to champion accessibility in the e-learning industry.