Stop Audio on Slide Revisits in Your Adobe Captivate eLearning

In this video, I show you how you can use a variable and simple advanced action to prevent a slide's audio from replaying on subsequent revisits. This is useful for slides that contain audio instructions but important on-screen text that learners may wish to review. If your course has many such slides you can save this advanced action as a shared action and apply the same logic to many slides throughout your course. Free Download Members of my YouTube Channel can download this project file for their own use.

Drag and Drop with Unique Feedback Captions

In this video tutorial, I show you how you can have unique feedback for each drag in a drag and drop interaction in your Adobe Captivate project.

Drag and Drop When More Than One Correct Answer is Needed

In this video tutorial, I show you how you can create a question using drag and drop when more than one correct answer is needed.

Scrolling interaction with Forced Navigation in Your Adobe Captivate Project

In this video, I show you how you can simulate a scroll up and down using multi-state objects, variables and advanced actions.

Tips for Small Business Survival (and Success) Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Small businesses are among those taking the biggest hits from the COVID-19 pandemic. Sure, bigger companies have had to strategize, but since small businesses operate with only a few months (or less) of cash flow, they are the ones at risk for the most devastating consequences.

If you run a small business, you may be looking for ways to keep your operations afloat, hold onto your employees, and retain your customers. While there are no easy ways to accomplish this feat, the tips below can get you going in the right direction. And if you make the right adjustments, you can even set yourself up for long-term success.

Get Money

If your small business is like countless others, you’re struggling to make ends meet right now. And while adjusting your business plan and figuring out ways to best serve your customers in these times is essential, you won’t be able to make much happen without cash flow.

Therefore, the first thing you should do is look at your financial assistance options. Between government programs (e.g., SBA traditional loans, SBA bridge loans, Main Street Business Lending Program) and non-government grants, you should be able to secure some cash to keep you afloat as you rework your financial and business plans.

Adjust Your Financial Plan

In an attempt to stave off extinction, many small businesses are letting go of their employees. Since employee salaries are generally one of the biggest expenses for a business, this might make sense in the short-term. However, for the long-term health of your business, keeping your employees at all costs can prove the best route. Not only does it inspire loyalty among your employees, but customers will notice that you’ve gone above and beyond to avoid layoffs.

Before you start with layoffs, think of any other ways that you can cut expenses. This might include speaking with your landlord about lowering or spreading out certain costs, working out deals with suppliers, cutting back on utilities, and so on. Furthermore, moving portions of your business online can also help you save significantly in the long run.

Add E-Commerce

E-commerce has been the saving grace for a lot of small businesses. The demand for online sales has been steadily increasing for years, and the pandemic has accelerated that demand. If you’re not selling products or services online yet, now is the time. If you’ve been selling online but can improve your process or expand your offerings, now is the time for that as well.

Whether it’s selling subscription boxes, digital downloads, or services, look into various e-commerce platforms to find one that best meets your needs. Even if you need to hire a software engineer or web designer to help make your online store appealing and user-friendly, it can help make you money over the long term.

Equip Your Employees

Hopefully, you will find a way to keep your employees. And if you do, it’s essential that they are equipped to thrive as things change. For example, make sure your team has all the communication and collaboration tools necessary to stay productive. Apps such as Slack and Chanty are great for team chats, and video conferencing software like Zoom and UberConference allow you to hold virtual meetings with individuals or teams.

Improve Your Site

Finally, take this opportunity to make improvements to your website. More people are looking at company websites for information and shopping these days, which means that it’s critical to make your site a priority. This is especially true if you are an eLearning designer or developer; if you’re offering instructional content via your website, you want it to be as engaging and user-friendly as possible for your clients. And in an age where competition is fierce, having a website that outshines your competitors is essential to keeping your business alive.

These times are certainly hard for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but small businesses are bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. So, help your small business survive now and succeed in the long run by securing financial assistance, tweaking your financial plan, and incorporating online sales. Lastly, make sure your employees have all the tools they need to succeed, and invest in giving your website a much-needed boost.

Solved - SWF Showing Up in Legacy Captivate Projects Converted to Responsive

I was helping a client with publishing an older legacy course that was originally developed when SWF publishing was still common. She was taking the project and converting it to responsive and attempting to publish it. She was ending up with errors related to the course containing SWF. Yeah, that’s right - SWF in a responsive design course! That shouldn’t even be possible.

I brought the engineers at Adobe into the conversation to help with this issue. I first discovered that if I didn’t convert to responsive first but merely ran the HTML5 tracker and removed any SWF resources I was able to publish to HTML5 without any SWF files. The Adobe team had me try repeating this process and only then convert it to responsive. This worked!

It seems that Adobe Captivate “remembers” the SWF configuration of these legacy older courses when it publishes, even if you publish as a responsive course. In the case of my client, it looked like the legacy course was originally published as a hybrid course that contained both HTML5 and SWF. Ultimately this wouldn’t work for her situation because her LMS was rejecting any SWF content.

If you’re getting similar problems in your race to get legacy content published without SWF and with responsive design, here’s the workaround in detail.

Open your legacy course that was originally published for SWF. Click on the Project dropdown menu and select HTML5 Tracker as shown below.

Once you launch the HTML5 Tracker you click on each item that has been identified as incompatible with HTML5 output. This will take you to that slide and select the object in question. In some cases, you can simply delete the object. If the content is crucial to the learning you can delete it and substitute it with something similar but compatible with HTML5. In this example, I have a slide transition that isn’t compatible with HTML5, some animated text on my slide title and a series of animated SWF arrows. I’m simply going to replace the animated text with a regular caption, remove the slide transition and replace the animated arrows with arrow shapes.

Once I have finished removing SWF related content from the course I need to publish before converting to responsive. Again this step is crucial in making sure that Captivate doesn’t keep the SWF in its “memory“ when I publish it as responsive later.

Some people get confused by the selection of HTML5 and SWF. Make sure that HTML5 looks darker and SWF looks lighter. It almost doesn’t matter what else you select just make sure you publish it once with only the HTML5 option selected.

Once you have successfully published it as an HTML5 project you can save your project as responsive using the File dropdown menu and selecting Save As Responsive.

You will likely see a warning message that Captivate will upgrade your project to the latest version of Adobe Captivate. Obviously, agree to this to proceed, but it’s a best practice to save it as a new project name so you can retain the original file just in case something goes wrong.

Once you have finished saving the new responsive version of your course, make whatever changes you need to the layout to support responsive design playback on multiple devices, i.e. add fluid boxes and drop your onscreen elements into those fluid boxes, so your course adjusts its appearance for those different size screens. When ready, you can then use the responsive design publishing method and be assured that SWF isn’t selected (even behind the scenes).

Easily Add PDFs to Your Adobe Captivate eLearning

In this video, I show you how to easily add PDFs to your Adobe Captivate eLearning project.

Why Captivate Isn’t Part of the Creative Cloud

This is the third time this week that someone has reached out to me with this question. When this happens I usually write a blog post to answer instead of writing the same email to multiple people explaining my thoughts about this controversial question. This way I can now refer people making similar inquiries to this post rather than repeating myself. Adobe has invited me to participate in things like conferences and training, but I think it’s important to say that I do not know Adobe’s plans for the marketing or selling of Adobe Captivate. When it comes right down to it, I’m just a user like all of you. Everything I say in this blog post is just my thoughts and opinion. There was a time when Adobe offered a product called the Adobe eLearning Suite. In fact, this is how I purchased my first personal copy of Adobe Captivate. The eLearning Suite included the following applications:

• Adobe Captivate

• Adobe Photoshop

• Adobe Dreamweaver

• Adobe Flash

• Adobe Audition

• Adobe Presenter

• Adobe Acrobat Professional

The last time Adobe offered this suite of products was with Adobe Captivate 6.

Since that time, the only other product where Adobe Captivate is bundled with other software from Adobe is in the Adobe Technical Communications Suite. The Adobe Technical Communications Suite includes the following pieces of software:

• Adobe Captivate

• Adobe FrameMaker

• Adobe RoboHelp

• Adobe Captivate (2019 release)

• Adobe Acrobat

• Adobe Presenter 11.1

Of course, many people are always hoping that Captivate will become part of the Creative Cloud. As a Captivate and Creative Cloud user, I completely understand this. For me, the greatest benefit of such a merger would be the ability to install all my Adobe apps from one Creative Cloud application. Imagine purchasing a new PC or Mac and simple logging into your Adobe Account and selecting the option to install all your Adobe software. I could go away and have lunch while everything I need to be creative that afternoon would magically appear on my new PC.

Of course, some of you are hoping for a reduced price. I understand that also. Captivate, and the Creative Cloud represents over $US 80 per month. I would gladly accept a bundled price of less than $80, but I don’t think everyone would agree. Imagine if you were not in the eLearning industry but were a Creative Cloud user. If Adobe asked you to suddenly pay $30 more for something you didn’t need or want, you would likely not accept that. I would imagine that many illustrators, designers, and graphic artists might start looking for alternatives to Creative Cloud.

And for those who think Adobe should absorb Captivate’s cost and include it in the Creative Cloud for free, I say no thanks. If Captivate became a bonus piece of software in the Creative Cloud, I would imagine that it would stop being the innovative software it is today. I’m fairly certain that Adobe would no longer offer new features like interactive video or 360° VR training. As free included software, Captivate would cease to be that innovative product it is today.

Make Your Own Captivate Shapes

In this Adobe Captivate video tutorial, I show you how you can make your own Captivate shapes for use in your eLearning project.

Apple iPad 10.2 8th Generation 2020

In this video, I review the new Apple iPad 10.2 8th Generation 2020.