Defaulting Slide Delay on slides 'inserted' from PowerPoint

[AlisonMc]

We are using Adobe Captivate 7 to create training 'movies' for customers. I create a template with a couple of native Captivate slides. Product managers insert PowerPoint slides - which represents most of the content of the project - into the template. The PowerPoint slides are imported using the following settings:

So the slides will automatically progress in the published 'movie'.

In the template (and edit preferences for the project) I have the slide default set as follows:

but no matter what I do, the inserted ppt slides default to slide delay 3 seconds (even though there is no longer a default set to that number).

I know changing it isn't particularly difficult -  just select all the slides and change from 3 to 8 seconds -  but I don't understand why it is not picking up the default (from the template or the project) and where it is picking up the 3 seconds from (apart from the fact that Adobe ships it with this default).

Any thoughts welcome. Thanks.

[Lilybiri]

Are you new to Captivate? Seems like that.

The 3 seconds (90 frames) you are showing is the duration of a slide, will be used when you insert a new slide, that is not a Delay! If you changed the default time to 8 seconds before inserting a new slide, that slide will have the duration of 8 seconds. The user needs some time to watch the slide, because the playhead is moving on all the time at a rate (FPS) of 30 frames per second.

When you import Powerpoint slides, each slide will be converted to a movie, taken into account all what happened on those Powerpoint slides like timed animations (text, graphics,... coming in). And maybe those slides are just static, don't have timed events, effects, animations? It would be very bad if those slides adapted to your default slide duration settings IMO, because then animations could be truncated, like trimming the video.

If the powerpoint slide are really static, nothing happens, and you don't like to offer the user control over the time he gets to watch each slide - which would be my option, not Automatically advance but advance on click - and each slide must be watched during 8 seconds, then you'll have to select all the PPT-slides in the Filmstrip and change the duration in the Timing accordion. Hope you are not insulted, but I find this not very user-friendly. And be sure in that case to not include a playbar because a bored user will be able to scrub quickly over slides he doesn't like.

Lilybiri