Merging Captivate 9 files into one larger file

Thanks for the pointers and pitfalls warning.

I did suspect all these, it went well.

With Captivate 9 (tested on several computers) I lost Copy when I selected more than 1 slide. So I copy-pasted over 400 slides, one at a time ... not fun.

It did highlight a few suggestions to the Captivate development team that I will pass on.

If you have 18 separate lessons and each of these has a quiz or some kind of scored assessment component that you want reporting to the LMS, then you need to be aware that merging all of the files into a single CPTX will result in getting only ONE score and completion result reported to your LMS.  You will lose the ability to get more granular reporting based on individual lessons.  Are you OK with that?

Also note that merging so many lessons into a single huge CPTX may make it unstable, and it will likely mean your end users have to wait quite a long time before their content will begin to play.  Having lots of smaller files would be better for response times.

If these modules are going to be served from a SCORM LMS, look into the possibility of using the Multi-SCORM Packaging tool that ships with Captivate.

As someone who has recently gone through the process of merging a number of Captivate files into a single larger file, I want to point out some potential pitfalls to the process of CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V.

One, if any of your slides use Master Slides, be sure to copy the Master slides into your new destination Captivate file BEFORE pasting in the slides that use them. If you do, they pasted slides will correctly use them, but if you forget to do this step first, the pasted slides will not be using Master slides.

Two, if your slides have Advanced Actions that reference variables, you are likely to run into the kinds of trouble I did. Say File A.cptx and File B.cptx both have a variable defined called "UserPoints". When you paste File A's slides into your new target file, all is fine, but when you paste File B's slides in, Captivate will now rename the variable UserPoints to append some random digits to the end of the variable name, requiring you to manually go through and identify every place that calls for those variables and re-establish them to the rightful name. 

Three, be sure to manually de-select any Results slide that you may have that is automatically generated when you insert a Quiz slide from your Ctrl-A operation, because you cannot copy this slide and it will not only silently fail to copy, it will prevent any subsequent slides from pasting in. 

Four, if you have Shared Actions, be very careful and check that everything is working. My experience is that very often when I paste slides that use Shared Actions, they come over as a default Continue action, presumably because objects that the SA reference are not found in the target file in exactly the way they were in the original. 

File Import is gone since version 5.

Make sure all files have the same resolution, and use the same THEME.

Open both files. Select all slides in the Filmstrip with CTRL-A. Use CTRL-C to copy. Swtich to the other file, and select the slide in the Filmstrip where you want to paste. Use CTRL-V.

Be careful if you have Quizzes: each file supports only one Quiz (SCORM requirement).

There will be no problem with identical labels, because Captivate takes care of that (intelligent relabeling). There may be problems with advanced actions, I recommend to use shared actions whenever possible.