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VanirCM
Participant
November 23, 2017
Question

Powerpoint Imports Crash with unnumbered "Fatal Error" and other Frustrations

  • November 23, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 177 views

I'm completely new to Captivate, working in it today and it's been deeply frustrating.  Tried to create Captivate project from existing powerpoints (a big selling point for us in buying Captivate) only to have a "Fatal Error" message (without an error number) come up each time, until I unchecked the default-selected 'linked' option (no idea why it worked either).  I followed that by creating a quiz from scratch, and everything moved rather slowly, from inserting a new Quiz slide to clicking to the next slide.  Then added a text box with difficulty until I realized my text could only be added through the properties box which is only about an 1.5" long...the text box on the slide did accept all the text I typed in, but perplexing WILL NOT Word Wrap!  Text longer than one line in the smallest font I could use that was still legible was just gets chopped off...and I cannot find anywhere to correct this. This should not even be a problem. For claiming to be integrated with Powerpoint, these problems shouldn't exist. 

I looked for tutorials through Adobe Captivate Help and thought I found some - until I realized that items were misnamed - for instance, 'create your first quiz' is not a tutorial showing you step by step how to create a quiz but rather a 2 minute marketing video about what the quiz feature can do.  Where do I find real tutorials? 

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    1 reply

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 23, 2017

    Vanir,

    To be honest, most of your issues are due to what you said at the beginning of your post.  You are completely new to Captivate and at this point you really have zero knowledge about how the app works and where to find all the features and functions etc on its interface.  We see comments like this from newbie users all the time on this forum. But you can't really blame Captivate for your own inexperience in using it. 

    Captivate is not a toy. It's a BEAST of a program, and it takes quite a while to master. It has a lot of power 'under the hood', and more than a few annoying quirks to say the least.  Some people love it, others hate it.  But it's still rated up there as the leading e-learning authoring tool on the planet...warts and all.

    If you are serious about learning how to use it, Google is your friend. There are courses for Captivate on Lynda.com.  Lilybiri (one of the main contributors on this forum) also has a website with lots of blog posts.  Another major contributor here, Paul Wilson, has numerous YouTube video tutorials available.

    Sadly, Adobe's own 'Help' files on Captivate usually come in for a decent amount of criticism.  So don't expect to find everything you need there.

    V
    VanirCMAuthor
    Participant
    November 23, 2017

    I hear you, but shouldn't basic out-of-the-box features that are constantly heralded by Adobe marketing brochures for their ease-of-use work without fanfare without requiring a new user to take Lynda.com or 3rd party how-to courses?  Yes.  And I have taken a number of YouTube courses on Captivate - it was the first thing I did, but none of the issues I raised in my posts were covered there.  Nor will they be, as creating a project from an existing 35 slide Powerpoint deck shouldn't crash a beast of a software program that trumpets its ability to create eLearning from Powerpoint, nor should text boxes fail to wrap like every other text box featured in a PC product on the market.   My IT warned me Captivate leaves its warts for the users to figure out...but I thought those warts would be due to its more complex tricks, not the basics.  

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 23, 2017

    Most people are aware that marketing materials for ANY software application will routinely trumpet ease of use as one of its major features.  If you haven't learned by now that Marketing people are not actually required to USE the software for which they write this stuff, then let me assure you...the Marketing folds usually have NO idea what they are talking about.  Their ONLY interest is in generating sales.  They never sit on the Support desk and answer phones.

    On the other hand, after many years answering questions about Captivate on this forum, I am very accustomed to new users complaining about the fact that they couldn't immediately get their head around Captivate, and that therefore the problem MUST be the application or its interface. For those users it seemed out of the question that the problem lay with their own lack of familiarity.

    As I pointed out on the other thread you have started with this, you just needed to turn on the option for Scrollbars on your Text Entry Boxes.  Not complex at all.  You just needed to know where to look.

    The reason for your 35 slide PPT file crashing Captivate is still as yet undetermined.  But my guess so far is that there's something on one of those slides that is causing a conflict.  I have often imported PPT decks much larger than yours successfully without issue.  But I have also seen instances where even a single PPT slide with a problem component could cause what you see.  So the trick here is to isolate WHERE the issue is occuring and remove the cause.

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