Adobe Captivate’s New Roundtrip PowerPoint Workflow

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I have been playing with the Adobe E-Learning Suite for several days now, and the Adobe Captivate 4 program bundled as part of the Suite continues impressing me with its logical workflows and options. In this post, I’ll focus on Captivate’s new Roundtrip PowerPoint workflow feature.

You start Captivate normally, and choose the From MS PowerPoint option within the Create Project area of the startup screen, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Start an Adobe Captivate project with a PowerPoint presentation

Doing so brings up an Open dialog box from where you can navigate to and choose any PowerPoint presentation. Both the new PPTX and older PPT file formats are supported. If you choose a PPTX file, Captivate launches PowerPoint behind the scenes although you won’t see the PowerPoint interface while it imports all the slides.

At this point in time, you can select individual slides from the presentation that you want to import, or just import all slides, as shown in Figure 2, below. One important option here is the Linked checkbox. If you enable this option, your Captivate project will be dynamically linked to your original PowerPoint file. Any changes made to the original PowerPoint file will reflect in your Captivate project.

Figure 2: Dynamically linked PowerPoint files in Captivate

Thereafter click the OK button, and Captivate will bring in all your PowerPoint slides into a new project, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Imported PowerPoint slides in Captivate

Note: Remember that the dynamically linked PowerPoint slides options (also known as Roundtrip PowerPoint Workflow) only works with PPTX files, and Captivate does not import any PowerPoint animations within the new project.