Copy and Paste Issue

[Tim Kingsford]

A cowork and I've encountered a problem with Captivate 5.5. After a number of "copy & paste" events from PowerPoint Captivate gets stuck on the same image during paste and will not paste the most recently copied image. Shutting down and restarting the application opens it back up to another series of copy & paste activities but very quickly we encounter the same behavior again. Has anyone else experience this and how can we get around it. It's maddening.

[Lilybiri]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

Do not think CP is the only application that chokes on multiple Copy/Paste actions, certainly between graphics heavy applications. I'm always shuddering when I read this kind of problems, because myself I have learned to avoid that 'simple' functionality whenever possible not only because of the Clipboard choking possibilities but also for quality reasons. You talk about Powerpoint: why do you use copy/paste instead of importing the slides? And if you only need the objects or the backgrounds from PPT, export them as images and import them in CP's library.

Sorry if this is not the answer you expected,

Lilybiri

[E_slinger]

Hello,

What is it that you are copy/pasting? Could you add the content to a master slide once and then apply that master instead of pasting each individually?

Lulybiri, good point about the library too...you could import the item to the library and simply pull from there too.

[Tim Kingsford]

Thanks for the responses. I think there are some good ideas to deal with the problems with the product. I would hope that Adobe can address these in time.

Here are the details:

I don't often use the entire PowerPoint slide (I would rather build something directly in Captivate rather than input from PowerPoint for training purposes). But, to avoid engaging too many Creative Services resources on project I find artwork that I can use, then use the decent tools provided in PowerPoint (or any Office Product really) to add nice shading, 3D look/feel, etc. to an image. It is a quick and easy way of changing the feel of the Captivate. I then can place that image into Captivate using cut/copy & paste. After doing this a few times it fails to work any longer. Using a: cmd.exe /c "echo off | clip" I cleared the Windows clipboard to see if the problem originated there and while it clears the clipboard for other applications it doesn't change the clipboard in use by Captivate (the problem persists).

I thank that Lilybiri provides some workable alternatives that I will begin using but it does take away some of the convenience/easy of use.

[RodWard]

When you've created your image in PowerPoint, instead of just copying and pasting it into Captivate, group all objects on the image in PowerPoint, then right click and choose Save As Picture.  Save the graphic as a PNG file and then insert this PNG file into Captivate.

I think you'll find you won't run into any brick walls with this method.   Copying and Pasting straight from PPT will be pasting in a Windows Metafile, which seems to be causing some issue.  I've never had any issue inserting PNGs.

[Lilybiri]

Hi Rod,

Tried to explain that as well, I really do not trust the Windows Clipboard since eons...

Lieve