Skip to main content
J
JohnAC
New Participant
April 24, 2015
Question

Animating bullet points on a single slide

  • April 24, 2015
  • 2 replies
  • 4512 views

I have a slide with 4 bullet points on.

How do I progress the bullets by clicking play and having the slide automatically advance to reveal the next bullet and pause before showing the bullet after that.  Like you would build in Keynote or PowerPoint

I can do this over 4 individual slides but that seems ridiculous in this day and age.

Please help.

Many Thanks

John

      This topic has been closed for replies.

      2 replies

      CaptivEd
      CaptivEd
      Inspiring
      January 22, 2016

      I feel your pain, John.

      Importing PPTs into Captivate is problematic for numerous reasons. For example, none of the objects come over and go into the library...they all embedded in the background of the slides.

      If you get frustrated, as did I, trying to get PPT content to work well after an import, someone helpful person in the forums will likely suggest you just use Captivate for your authoring instead....fair enough. But then, Captivate does not have some of the most basic presentation-type features...like, as you mentioned, animating a bulleted list of text, so that the bullets come in/go out one at a time. Bulleted lists, though often abused, do have their place in eLearning...especially if you can animate the bullets in synchronized to other objects like images.

      Even formatting features...you cannot effectively control the spacing in a text caption with bullets. You can control spacing to some degree, but nothing close to the sophistication of other types of apps like presentation or word processing. Not asking that Captivate be either of those types of apps, but some functionality would be expected.

      I have an animated bulleted list that I did in PowerPoint...because of the above, to reproduce with the same functionality in CP, I will (unless I am missing something) have to create a separate "text caption" for each bullet and its text, and then time and animate each one separately. And there is no "Fade" animation in CP....you must go into the Timing Properties and set a transition an object to fade in or fade out.

      OK...rant over!

      Captiv8r
      Captiv8r
      Braniac
      January 22, 2016

      Hi there

      If you wanted to fade bullets in, it's pretty simple to achieve.

      I would do it as follows:

      Insert a Transparent Text Caption with the full bulleted list.

      Then overlay that caption with a few different Highlight Boxes or Shapes that were configured to match the background. Then one by one cause the shapes to fade out to reveal the bullets.

      I'm sure one of the other regulars will be along any moment now to advise how ridiculous my own approach would be and advise that ALL YOU HAVE TO DO Is...

      Cheers... Rick

      RodWard
      RodWard
      Braniac
      January 23, 2016

      You pretty much took the words out of my mouth Rick.

      I was also thinking that Captivate does all of the things that Ed was saying.  It's just that it doesn't do it in the same way.

      Honestly, each authoring app has it's own approach and I don't see anything wrong with the way Captivate does these things.  If an e-learning developer prefers one tool over another, that's their personal decision.

      Lilybiri
      Lilybiri
      Braniac
      April 24, 2015

      You can stagger the captions on  the timeline and add click boxes (staggered as well). What you are asking for is typical for a presentation tool, I try to avoid bullets as much as possible for eLearning.

      J
      JohnACAuthor
      New Participant
      April 24, 2015

      Thanks for that amazingly swift reply Lilybiri.

      A click box for each bullet?

      Am I not able to utilise the main navigation buttons at the bottom?

      J
      JohnACAuthor
      New Participant
      April 25, 2015

      Maybe you should take some training for Captivate or at least buy a (good) book? I'm sure to be able to realize what you want in less than 15 minutes...for more than 1 slide.

      Toggle Shape buttons - Captivate 6 - Captivate blog

      Custom Play/Pause button in Captivate - Captivate blog


      Thanks for your help.

      Of course I wouldn't dream of using this level of software without some training.  My first port of call before I even signed up for the trial was Lynda.com.  I subscribe to that site and have always been impressed with their work. I did over 5 hours with 'Adobe Captivate 8 Essential Training'  and 'Captivate Projects: Mobile and Responsive Design'  I then revisited them after I started the trial and have been revisiting then frequently for the past two days. Good courses I thought!

      There are all sort of bugs in AC8 that are both frustrating and surprising for a mature piece of software...I guess its probably just me with unreasonably high expectations.  Manually scrolling the timeline often does not give a true representation of the slides progress...reordering timeline layers often leaves the layer names in the wrong order, allocated to the wrong layer - with the need to select another slide and then select the original to correct the layer names. Layers also sometimes jump when moving them.  Grouping objects is a very unpredictable operation - these are just a few of the more frequent frustrations.

      The inability to on the fly test in different browsers...? :-0

      No .ai or even .svg import...pretty unbelievable...astonishing even!  AI is part of the Adobe Family - How wonderful would this be for Smart Shapes instead of the basic array of tools AC provides.

      Symbol type libraries for commonly used items

      I could go on but I don't want to bore you and in truth I expect, being such a new user, I am getting much of this wrong and missing where to control these issues.

      Doing a simple PowerPoint type presentation that I can export to HTML5, with a bit of user interaction I expected to be a walk in the park for AC...but its actually a very intricate process...maybe I should go back Hype3 Pro, a good HTML5 application...but Its a much lower level of app I love to learn to use industry standard software.  The must be a reason AC has such a dedicated user-base.

      I am however, terrifically grateful to you for taking the me to try and help me.

      I'll re-start my efforts again in the morning when my stress level have returned to something around normal!

      ---

      John

        Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
        Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices