Category: Powerpoint

Adobe Captivate

Captivate: Change background images on imported Powerpoint slides to repositionable Captivate images

Captivate allows you to import a Powerpoint file to use as the starting point for your learning activity. It’s often easier for people to “think” in Powerpoint, so many users prefer to rough out a project in Powerpoint, then import it and continue working in Captivate.

When a Powerpoint file is imported this way, its images become part of the Background element of the slide in Captivate. Backgrounds are not easily repositionable, or croppable, but it’s not hard to bring the background image up onto the slide as a regular image element that can be moved around, edited, and included in actions.

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Remove mouse-click sounds in Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter and Articulate

Adobe Captivate, Articulate and Adobe Presenter can all add annoying clicking sounds or “pops” between slides when there is narration. These clicks often are associated with either picking up the actual mouse-click used to switch slides, are added in by the application by design, or added in as an audio artifact. The solutions vary depending on the application and cause.

  1. Adobe Captivate: the clicks can be mouse-click sounds added by Captivate. To silence these generated mouse-click sounds, you may want to try this suggestion from the Paul Dewhurst’s “RaisingAimee” site. Replace the standard mouse-click sound with a silent sound file from Paul’s site:

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Hide the playbar in a Presenter presentation

One of our content experts wanted to use Powerpoint to create an interactive presentation. Although Captivate would probably be the ideal choice, she only owns Adobe Presenter, so I suggested she use that to convert the Powerpoint for the web.

The problem is that Presenter, by default, shows a navbar on the side and a playbar below the presentation. In this case, allowing linear movement would break the logical flow of the interactive module. This project is more of a decision-support tool, and less a linear learning module where the user must view every page. To make a module like this function correctly using Adobe Presenter, follow these steps:

  • Before entering Presenter, add navigation buttons or hyperlinked images to your Powerpoint slides that allow user interaction to choose the path through the module. Many slides will probably just need a “Next” button, but certain slides will function as decision points where your users will choose which path to follow. You may have to draw out a flow chart to do this correctly if there are a lot of slides and decision points.
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A workaround for the lack of trigger animations in Keynote

One Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.

A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.

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Use Subtitle Workshop to generate captions for Rich-MediaProject

Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Producer has become less and less of a viable option for synching powerpoint and video. Probably because of browser changes, it works on less browsers than before, and is no longer compatible even with Powerpoint 2007. So I went in search of a Flash-based replacement for MS Producer. I’ve found it in the Rich-Media-Project’s Rich-Media Pack I.

RMP I features 4 components: A Flash-Paper “player”, an FLV video player, a slide list and a media playlist. You create a flash-paper version of the powerpoint or word document, then synch it to the video with XML. The playlist is generated by another xml file, and the captions are created using a third XML file.
The only thing missing is an easy way to create the XML files, so I am creating templates for the captions and slide list XML files in Subtitle workshop. Below is the code for the Custom Format file for the captions:

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How to publish Powerpoint files for the web

This procedure which will leave you with an original PowerPoint-format (to use in lectures) document, and a web-enabled version:

  1. Create a standard powerpoint presentation. Save it as ProjectName.ppt in the folder you are using for the project. Make sure every slide has a Title. These titles will be used as the titles of the buttons on the left navigation column in your web page. It helps to use a powerpoint template so that you are definitely creating a title with each new slide.
  2. When you are done editing, and ready to make a web version of the presentation, select Save as Webpage from the File menu.
    The Save As dialog comes up.
  3. Navigate to your project folder in the file list area. Double-click on the folder so that it opens and you are working inside it.
  4. Click the CreateNewFolder icon just to the right of the Save in: box. (the icon looks like a folder with a spark on it.)
    A New Folder dialog will pop up. Type learningmodule in the Name box.
  5. Hit OK. You will now be “inside” the learningmodule folder.
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