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NV_monkey_girl
Participant
November 1, 2008
Answered

Advancing slides

  • November 1, 2008
  • 1 reply
  • 330 views
Hi guys,

I'm a fairly new user of Captivate, but I've been poking around these forums and I can't find what I'm looking for. So here it is:

I'm creating a project where sometimes, the users may try to advance the slide before the slide display time is up. I have several different ways to advance the slide: clicking or hitting Enter or Page Down (Page Up is "back"). But, in previewing and the final product after publishing, if I try to do one of those actions before the animations and text have all appeared, after they have appeared the advance action doesn't work. I have to use one of the other actions to advance the slide. I find this a problem because, for example, if a user is used to clicking through things like this, they might get frustrated that it doesn't work (even though technically they still could advance the slide another way, i.e. by hitting Enter or Page Down).

Is this a limitation of Captivate, or is there a way I can make this work? My ideal situation would be this: if a user tries to advance the slide before it's completely displayed, the action is stored until the end of the slide, and then it immediately advances. However, ignoring the premature advance action would be fine as well.

Thanks for any input!
This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer NV_monkey_girl
Rick,

The way I set it up is that I have three click boxes on each slide. One covers the entire slide and enables clicking and hitting the shortcut key 'Enter' to advance the slide. The second is a tiny click box in the corner that enables the shortcut key 'Page Down' to advance, and the third is another tiny click box that enables the shortcut key 'Page Up' to go back to the previous slide. I learned that from surfing the forums. :)

Anyway, I tried your solution of the action being "Go to next slide" instead of "Continue," and it worked! Thank you so much. Pretty simple, really, but I hadn't thought of it, and I've been trying to figure this out for hours.

Just an FYI if you're curious, the content of the slides shows up in a quiz question in the next few slides, so people who skip the content will just have to go back and read it; they won't be missing anything except a little extra time. :)

1 reply

Captiv8r
Captiv8r
Legend
November 1, 2008
Welcome to our community, Gretchen

Unfortunately, I do not believe a way exists that will allow what you are wanting. What you are describing is caching the action and only applying it after the desired time has elapsed.

I'm not sure how you are currently allowing the user to advance the slides. Normally one would insert either a Click Box or Button object to do this. With either of those objects you are able to choose the action associated with them. If you just inserted them without changing the action, the default setting is to "Continue".

I'm thinking the best you may do here is to edit the objects and change the assigned action. Perhaps selecting "Go to next slide" as the new action.

Once you do that, the slides should advance upon the user action. Unfortunately, that might allow skipping over the desired elements.

You might simply consider using Button objects. I did this with some projects. I'll toss out my approach in case it may help you here.

In my approach, I had images of the buttons that provided the illusion of the Button in a disabled (grayed out) state. It was just an image. Actually, I inserted these on the first slide and configured them to display for the rest of the project. Then, once the slide had progressed to the point where my client was satisfied the user had viewed it, the clickable Button object appeared. This provided the illusion that the Disabled (grayed out) button image suddenly became enabled and could be acted upon.

Hopefully something here was useful to you... Rick
N
NV_monkey_girlAuthorCorrect answer
Participant
November 2, 2008
Rick,

The way I set it up is that I have three click boxes on each slide. One covers the entire slide and enables clicking and hitting the shortcut key 'Enter' to advance the slide. The second is a tiny click box in the corner that enables the shortcut key 'Page Down' to advance, and the third is another tiny click box that enables the shortcut key 'Page Up' to go back to the previous slide. I learned that from surfing the forums. :)

Anyway, I tried your solution of the action being "Go to next slide" instead of "Continue," and it worked! Thank you so much. Pretty simple, really, but I hadn't thought of it, and I've been trying to figure this out for hours.

Just an FYI if you're curious, the content of the slides shows up in a quiz question in the next few slides, so people who skip the content will just have to go back and read it; they won't be missing anything except a little extra time. :)
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