Adobe Captivate’s Storyboard View: Similarity for PowerPoint Users

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Let me imagine that you started your eLearning project with a PowerPoint presentation, and then you imported that presentation into Adobe Captivate. It’s worth noting here that Captivate 4 includes this newPowerPoint roundtrip workflow that we discussed in an earlier blog post.

OK, now that you have imported your PowerPoint presentation into Captivate, it’s time to get working. First of all, let us tell you that at least two of the three views in Captivate look and work exactly like PowerPoint’s own views although they are called different names.

• Captivate’s Storyboard view is similar to PowerPoint’s Slide Sorter view.
• Captivate’s Edit view is roughly the same as PowerPoint’s Normal view, and we’ll cover this in a future post.
• Captivate does have a third view called Branching that we’ll discuss some other time. Of course, PowerPoint also has another view called Slide Show that well, just plays all the slides full-screen.

Now about the Storyboard view in Captivate 4, which you can see in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Captivate’s Storyboard View

In this view, you can drag and reorder slides just like you can within PowerPoint. You can also right-click any of the slides to be presented with a menu that provides some familiar options (see Figure 2) such as Hide Slide, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. In addition, there are some options here that PowerPoint does not provide (and we wish it did!). These are the Lock Slides and Properties options.

Figure 2: Slide Right-Click Options

Now let us choose the Properties option in the right-click menu. This brings up this cool Properties dialog box that seems to include everything except the kitchen sink! Look at Figure 3, and you’ll see that there’s an awful lot you can do with your slides in Captivate.

Figure 3: Slide Properties in Adobe Captivate

Here are some of the options available to you within the Properties dialog box:

• Label: You can change the name of your slide.
• Display Time: Set the slide display time.
• Transition: Not half as many transitions as within PowerPoint, but the simple ones are covered.
• Quality: Set the image quality. This is important hsince Captivate outputs to Flash and you’ll want to create files that have a smaller output size.
• Hide Slide and Lock Slide: Means just what they say!

We haven’t covered all the options in the Properties dialog box, but as you can see, these are quite extensive and powerful.