Review: Adobe Captivate 2

In addition to streaming output, you can also render a standalone executable, publish the project to Adobe Connect Enterprise, or upload the finished project via FTP. One extraordinarily helpful option is the ability to output the slides to a Word document, complete with graphics, captions, slide notes, and blank lines for learner notes. You can pick and choose the slides to include and produce them in table format, with up to nine slides per page.

Once in Word, you can customize as necessary. You can view the document I produced from Captivate here. What you see is direct from Captivate without any additional editing on my part. Add a couple of numbered instructions per slide, and you have a document that significantly enhances your online presentation.

Quizzes and Simulations
Captivate’s second function is to create online quizzes and simulations, and here the experience is nearly overwhelmingly positive, though there are pockets of room for improvement. Let’s start with the basics, and then discuss the grumbles.

In this version, Adobe added a helpful quiz and simulation wizard to get you started. As before, you can add still images, audio, or video to your slides to make the simulation more realistic. Adobe also added a new view to visually display the program’s branching capabilities, with legends for success and failure branches and other results.

Also new is an Advanced Interaction view that provides a more data-oriented view of the interactions. Between the two new screens, and Captivate’s already rich, multimedia development environment, Captivate can now go far beyond simple multiple-choice quizzes into complex simulations for training sales, human resources, and other personnel.

My grumble? I’d like to have an easier way to make the questions look uniform. For example, once you deviate from a template, like moving a button or answer to a different location, it can be time-consuming to make the same changes to other slides. My initial thought was to perfect the look and feel of one question, then duplicate that and use it as a template for other questions. However, you can’t duplicate questions in Captivate.

I went back and forth with Adobe on the easiest way to duplicate a custom look and feel, and got little help. If you view the quiz I created at www.doceo.com/quiz.htm, you’ll see that the buttons and text are located in different locations on each slide, which would drive me crazy if this was a real project.

Then I discovered Captivate’s Grid and Snap to Grid functions, and realized I could clean it all up in about 20 minutes. Perhaps not so easy to fix is another problem I had, where the title looked fine in the project but didn’t show up in the rendered quiz. Basically, it seemed that the more you strayed from Captivate’s pre-built templates, the greater the potential for incurring minor, but irritating, issues like these.

I also experienced one strange operational anomaly in Question 6 of my quiz: answer B doesn’t appear. I duplicated the question using Adobe’s fixed template as Question 7, which worked fine, so the problem doesn’t appear to be endemic. When I created the quiz on another computer, the problem went away entirely. For all future quizzes, I’ll simply use Adobe’s template unmodified and hopefully avoid formatting and other issues entirely.

What’s the net/net? Captivate offers extraordinary functionality with some potholes you will need to identify and learn to avoid. The new branching simulation tools take the product far beyond its screen capture and simple quiz roots, to where it can provide a unique value in the enterprise.