Need Adobe Presenter If Have Captivate?

Hello Keith,

Will try to answer, I'm using Adobe Presenter as well as Adobe Captivate and will try to explain why. In addition I would like to point you to a recently published blog about the difference and use cases (RJ Jacquez) as well:

http://blogs.adobe.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=237&search=Captivate+and+Presenter

Presenter is a very easy tool to convert a PPT into a SWF, it enables you to add audio, video. It has a nice tabbed panel that allows the user to see the TOC, to search, where you can add notes, thumbnails, your e-mail address, a photo or a small video. If I do want to convert a PPT quickly and have those added features I will almost always use Presenter. Nice feature is that all hyperlinks (p.e. to jump to another slides) will be kept in the converted SWF. Although it is possible to make quizzes in Presenter, I have never used them because for real interactivity I'll always turn to Captivate.

It is possible to convert a PPT to a SWF with Captivate too, and I'll use that feature when I want to mix PPT-slides with other slides (such as captured slides), quizzes, branching. Captivate has a lot more in its box, compared to Presenter when you want interactivity for your eLearning courses.You can have some of the features I described about the tabbed panel, by using the TOC (which allows multiple levels, as is not the case in Presenter), but not all of them.

I do not quote Jacquez, use this expression since a long time: use the best of two worlds by combining CP-created SWF's with a Presenter-created presentation SWF. But to see this, better have a look at the video in the blog I mentioned.

This is my personal idea, I do understand your question very well because I was wondering a year ago about the difference between both. If I had to choose one of them, I would definitely go with Captivate, but am very happy to have both of them now. Some bonus: for students (I'm a college teacher) who do not have access to our LMS I will publish the Presenter file (with embedded CP-SWF's) to a Acrobat-file (your do not need to have Acrobat Pro for that). You get a nice multimedia pdf in which the SWF's will 'play'.

Hope this will help you?

Lilybiri