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chantalC001
Inspiring
October 6, 2017
Answered

Why did Captivate 2017 stop doing previews?

  • October 6, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 1001 views

Captivate 2017 suddenly stopped doing previews. I also can't publish to my local machine. It is a very simple project, and it all worked fine for the last few days, and even earlier today. Then I got the "Fatal Error, please restart" message, and after that I could not do previews anymore.

I am at the most recent version, and running as Administrator. Please help!

I have tried all the variations of Preview, rebooted my laptop (Win7) and I seem to be stuck with no Previews now.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer chantalC001

Hi,

I am in the process of copying all my slides to a new template and that seems to be working, even with the Quiz slides not hidden. In my old project, I could get it to preview if the quiz slides (as yet unused) were hidden. They are just blank quiz slides, one for each type of question.

So, I think my file became corrupted somehow.

Thanks

3 replies

Paul Wilson CTDP
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 9, 2017

Your CPTX file may have become corrupt. Try copying all the slides from the current project into a new project and see if that preview works.

Paul Wilson, CTDP
chantalC001
chantalC001AuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
October 9, 2017

Hi,

I am in the process of copying all my slides to a new template and that seems to be working, even with the Quiz slides not hidden. In my old project, I could get it to preview if the quiz slides (as yet unused) were hidden. They are just blank quiz slides, one for each type of question.

So, I think my file became corrupted somehow.

Thanks

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 10, 2017

You mention you are using a 'template' file.  If by this you mean a CPTL file and not a CPTX, could I just recommend that you avoid using the CPTL file type completely and just use CPTX instead?

The CPTL template has some major bugs which will come back to bite you bigtime if you happen to be building any Advanced Actions and User Variables into this template.

The recommended replacement for a template is to build a CPTX file and set its properties to READ-ONLY so that whenever a developer uses it to start a new project, trying to save changes will invoke a Save As dialog, leaving the original 'template' unchanged.

Lilybiri
Legend
October 7, 2017

Clear the cache. If that is not helping, try to run the CleanPreferencesWin.bat file which you find in the subfolder Utils under the installation folder. Captivate has to be closed while doing that. If you have customisation this could be lost, have a look at this articel to be able to recover them:

Captivate 8.0.1 Install? Keep your Customisation! - Captivate blog

chantalC001
Inspiring
October 7, 2017

Clearcache did not work, but Ill try the Preferences thing next.

Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device

chantalC001
Inspiring
October 9, 2017

I did The CleanPreferences.bat (twice) and my project still won't preview. I opened and older project and it previewed o.k. 

Something else that is also weird in this project, is that it randomly doesn't display text that is in text boxes, or buttons. If I then click in the blank space, the text is displayed. I have never seen this happen before. Even some of the slide titles do this.

Currently I only have 15 slides with content and then a few blank quiz template slides.

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 7, 2017

Have you tried resetting your Preferences?