When I started using Captivate there were a handful of Captivate experts whose knowledge helped me get up to speed. Even back then I relied on other experts to figure out how to do various things in Captivate. Unfortunately, the resources and documentation have ranged from either non-existent to poor and incomplete. Making my YouTube video tutorials at YouTube.com/PaulWilsonLearning has been my way of paying it forward. Lately, there have been some users complaining about this shortcoming once again and I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a feature on the help pages that might help us force Adobe to fix some of these areas.

I had the need to bone up on my knowledge of the software simulation feature in Adobe Captivate. It’s been a few years since I’ve used this feature and I wanted to check if anything new has come out. I pressed F1 to launch Help and of course, it brought me to the usual Adobe Captivate Learn & Support page. I typed in Software Simulation in the Search Adobe Support Search bar and pressed enter. The resulting list of web pages includes items from the Adobe Forums and the actual Help Documentation as well. I choose this page: https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate/using/record-software-simulations.html which not only had some great detail but included some links to other resources. One such link that interested me was a demonstration of the recording process found at this link here: http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_recordtutorial_en. At the time that I’m writing this article that link takes you to…

I was disappointed because I love watching video tutorials as anyone who knows me can attest to. Anyway, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and going to make a sandwich I paid particular attention to what might be on the original page that I could report this problem too. On the bottom right-hand side of the page was this item…

I thought well that’s interesting so I decided to select the No option and see what happens. This is what appeared next…

So I decided to start typing an explanation as to what was wrong with the page that I was on and then click on Submit.

My hope is that someone gets these notifications and takes action. In this case, it was a dead link and perhaps someone from Adobe will remove the link, or perhaps they will find the correct page that the link should be pointing to and fix it.

I see this feature as the great democratizer of the Help pages. Today it’s a dead link, tomorrow it’s an incomplete or out of date tutorial or explanation of an important feature. Instead of sitting around and being grumpy about having to put up with this shortcoming, we each should do our part to let Adobe know when something isn’t right.

…Oh and keep writing our blog posts, posting our videos, writing out testimonials and so on.