PLEASE NOTE: This information was originally posted on my website back in 2014. The method explained in the videos linked below has now been greatly simplified in more recent editions of Adobe Captivate. Instead of hiding and showing lots of grouped objects it is now possible to achieve very similar results using Object States.
Have you ever wanted to add more interactivity to your e-learning course by including a Dynamic Menu Slide with links to sections of your content? You would not normally use this type of navigation for strictly linear e-learning modules. But if the course module has several content sections and they can be done in any order, a menu slide makes good sense.
Well in these two video tutorials I show you how to do just that with several progressively more complex examples, starting from a bare bones simple example, up to menu slides that include visual feedback to indicate which items a user has interacted with, and finally to a very complex menu slide.
Start with simple examples first!
The first video below explains how to create very simple menu slides that require only interactive objects. Then it moves on to two more complex examples that require custom User Variables and Conditional Advanced Actions. Don’t worry if yiou are unfamiliar with these concepts as I explain how everything works from the ground up.
Watch the first YouTube video below to see how all of this is done!
Taking things to the next level
The Infosemantics template for Adobe Captivate has a built-in Dynamic Menu slide that is far more complex than the simple examples explained in the video above. The next video below builds on the concepts explained above and showcases how to use the dynamic slide from the Infosemantics project template.
In this tutorial we explain how to create, edit, and delete Adobe Captivate variables. One of the easiest tasks you’ll ever perform in Captivate is to create a new user variable. This is just as well, because if you intend to be creating complex interactivity in your e-learning, you’ll definitely be creating lots of variables!
Create a User Variable
From the Project main menu, select the Variables option.
When the Variables dialog opens, click the Add New button.
Enter a default variable value (if applicable) and provide a Description of its purpose.
When you are finally happy with the details, click the Save button. Your newly-created variable will now be listed in the lower part of the Variables dialog. Variables are listed in alphabetical order, with only two exceptions. The user variables called cpQuizInfoStudentID (used for Internal Server Reporting) and cpQuizInfoStudentName (used for capturing the student name variable from a learning management system). For some reason, Adobe has opted to have these variables always sort to the bottom of the list of variables.
Edit a User Variable
Once you’ve created a number of user variables from time to time you’ll need to change something. Since you cannot change the variable’s name, your editing options are limited to altering the default value, description text, or removing/deleting the variable altogether.
Open the Variables dialog and select the variable you want to change. (The Update button is initially disabled until you make some detectable change to the variable properties.)
You cannot edit the variable’s name. Edit the Value or Description fields as needed and then click the Update button. (After making the change, the Update button again becomes inactive.)
Remove (Delete) a User Variable
As you develop a project you may find that some of the variables you create become redundant and need to be removed (perhaps because you had to create a duplicate variable with a different name). It’s a good idea to take out the trash by deleting these unwanted variables because they can waste browser memory and slow down run-time performance.
The process is simple enough…but there are some important issues to be aware of:
Open the Variables dialog and select the variable to be deleted.
Click the Remove button.
Now things get a little more complex. Please note the following caveats about removing variables:
You can only remove user variables, not system variables.
You can remove a variable referenced by a single action that assigns its value, but this will result in the action being reset to Continue.
You can only remove user variables that are NOT currently being used to display values in screen objects such as text captions or shapes. Additionally, you cannot remove any variables currently referenced by Standard or Conditional Actions in your project file. If you try to remove one of these referenced variables, Captivate will show the following warning message. Unfortunately, this warning message doesn’t give you any information about which specific slides or advanced actions use the variable and need to be modified before you can remove it. In a large project with many slides and actions, this can be like trying to find a needle in a digital haystack.
Trace variable usage
Just click the Variables dialog Usage button (similar to the one on the Advanced Actions dialog) to show where the currently selected variable is referenced on any slide in the project, as well as which specific run-time event is used to execute the action involved.
This now makes it extremely easy to do any required project file housekeeping. If your variable is not used anywhere, you’ll just see a dialog simply saying “Item is not currently in use” and you can safely delete it.
However, there appears to be one caveat. Variables that are referenced in widgets don’t get taken into account by the Usage dialog. So if you have a lot of widgets or interactions (which are also widgets) in your project, you may need to check them manually before starting any round of mass deletions.
One of the easiest ways to make use of Adobe Captivate variables is to display their values in text captions, shapes, and Smart Shape objects at run-time. In the example below I show how this is done by inserting several display fields into a single text caption.
How to display project information
Let’s imagine your project needs to have the e-learning author’s name and contact information appear on a slide at run-time. Here’s how you could do that:
Create a new blank project and open the File > Project Info… (This is quicker than navigating to the same dialog location using Edit > Preferences > Project > Information.)
Type relevant information into the fields provided.
On another slide in your project file, insert a text caption and some text to indicate the type of information it provides.
Place your mouse cursor at the point in the text caption where you want to insert the variable display field.
On the Properties tab > Format accordion, click the Insert Variable icon.
When the Insert Variable dialog opens, change the Variable Type to System and from the Variables drop-down list select cpInfoAuthor as the variable to be inserted.
Pay close attention to the default value shown in the Maximum length field. It has some serious gotchas! Gotcha # 1: In earlier versions of Cp this field was set to 15 characters by default. This length is fine if all you are doing is displaying a number, identifier code, or slide name. But it’s usually too short to display personal names, company names, course names, etc. In Cp7 the default length has been increased to 50 characters, but you can change it to specify any length up to about 250 characters. So give careful thought to how much information you need to display and set the field length accordingly.Gotcha # 2: There is a bug in versions prior to Cp7 where if you happen to be inserting a number of variables one after another, the Maximum Length field randomly reverts to a value of 0. So be sure to take a moment to check this field before hitting the OK button.
Gotcha # 3: If you happen to guess wrong about the required number of characters to allow as the length of the display field, you cannot easily change it. You must delete the inserted field and re-insert another one to change the display length. So it’s usually wise to bet a little on the high side to be safe.
Once you’re happy with the details of the inserted variable, click the OK button. Your variable will appear by name, surrounded by double dollar signs (e.g. $$cpInfoAuthor$$).
Repeat the last few steps to insert any other variables in the same caption. It should then appear something like the example screenshot shown below.
Publish your project to see how the variables are displayed in the caption. They should look something like the screenshot below.
Why not just type the variable name with $$ characters on either end?
Perhaps you’ve read throught the steps above and wondered if you can insert a variable into a caption or shape by just typing the variable name and adding $$ characters at the beginning and end. Yes you can.
However, while it may be slightly faster, the downside to this method it that it doesn’t allow you to set the number of characters for the maximum display length. It will just assign the default amount, which is only 15 characters for Cp versions 5 through to 6.1 and 50 characters for Cp7. The 15 character default was far too small, and even 50 characters will sometimes be insufficient.
So, call me a control freak, but I still prefer to insert variables via the dialog method and set the display length myself.
Overcoming dynamic text formatting issues
When you insert a variable into a caption or shape, don’t be surprised if you need to fiddle around with the formatting a bit before it all looks right at run-time. These formatting issues are due to the fact that normal caption text is ‘static text’ (because it doesn’t change at run-time) while variable display text is ‘dynamic text’ (because it can change depending on the current value of the variable being displayed). In Captivate’s published output, captions containing static text are actually converted into images. But since this means the text becomes an image too, this approach would not allow dynamic text to change on-the-fly at run-time. So, static and dynamic text strings are kept separate. The result can be certain inconsistencies in visual formatting.
For example, some early versions of Captivate did not allow dynamic text to be indented. If you applied indenting in Edit mode, the indenting disappeared at runtime. If you added variable text into the middle of a paragraph of static text in a caption, none of that text would honor the applied formatting. This often resulted in captions with text unattractively crammed into the top-left corner or positioned hard against the left side of the caption. There were also notable differences in the aliasing of the text. For example note the differences in the two run-time captions below from Cp 5.5.
The text in the caption above left is just typed in. The one on the right is displaying text supplied by a user variable. The workaround for such formatting issues is to place dynamic text inside a transparent caption positioned on a layer above another caption. This made it appear as if the underlying caption contained the dynamic text when in fact it was just acting as a background.
Fortunately, these issues have been steadily diminishing with each new version and it’s now quite difficult to tell static and dynamic text apart as you can see from the Cp7 examples shown below.
Hopefully one day, in some future Cp version, there will be no discernible differences at all.
