Time! Needless to say that it is one thing every one of us is short of….

Captivate 3 introduced multi-mode recording- wherein you could record an application once, and generate 3 different projects from this recording- a demo, a simulation (training) and an assessment. This was a big timesaver. Now I’ll show you a way how you can take this one step further. Many a time, you would end up going into your recorded projects and making further fine grained edits to ensure that the project looks and behaves exactly as you envisioned. These edits will have to be repeated in each project mode (demo, simulation, assessment).

Today I’ll show you how you can create one recorded project, make the edits on this project, and then generate both the Training and Assessment modules in one shot (hence cutting your post production time in half!).

Let’s take an example:

Say you need to create a training and assessment module for “How to delete cookies in Internet Explorer?” The steps involved are:

Step 1: In the internet explorer, click on the ‘tools’ button.

Step 2: Select Internet options

Step 3: Under general tab, click on the ‘Delete’ button.

Step 4: In the Delete browsing history window, check the ‘cookies’ checkbox.

Step 5: Click the ‘Delete’ button.

 First of all let me tell you what is the difference between a training and an assessment module….both of these files are exactly the same with a small difference that in training file you have an extra ‘hint caption’ which assists an end user  as in what he/she is supposed to do next. This ‘hint caption’ is absent in an assessment module.

Now let’s get our hands dirty with the actual procedure… Go to edit> preferences> recording> modes> and ensure that ‘hint captions’ and ‘failure captions’ for both ‘click boxes’ and ‘text entry boxes’ are checked (as shown in the movie below). Record your project in ‘training’ mode. This recorded project can now be edited (post production) and published as your training module. Now to generate the assessment module, you open the project, select any one of the click boxes, and suppress the hint caption for that click box. Now you do an ‘apply all’ to disable all the hint captions across the project. A similar step should be followed when you have a text entry box. Watch this Captivate movie to see the detailed steps involved.

So now you know how you could save your editing hours!! Happy authoring….

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