General settings not saving

[Megan5ECB]

Can someone please help me. I have been all day at this. I am working from home using a Surface Pro and monitor for the next 3 weeks. I have had to reset my project preferences includng directing the cashe to my C drive and enabling customer workspaces. However, every time I have logged out of Captivate to save my preferences, when I re-open it, my preferences have not changed. I really can't work effectly with the Classic Workspace. I know how to undock the panels but it is just not saving the preferences and I can not move the panels. I am on a network here and can not run Captivate as Administrator.

[Lilybiri]

Totallly understand you don't want to keep with the Newbie UI, where you are controlled by the application.

My 'travel' system is a Surface Pro as well, without an external monitor. I suppose you tried to reset the Global Preferences (before opening a project)? Problem may be that your profile is a roaming profile, which means that the Preferences in Captivate - which are stored in your profile - seems to be overridden every time. Although I think that is not the cause, I would also disconnect the external monitor just for setting the preferences. The limitation of not being able to Run as Administrator normally doesn't prevent you to change personal preferences because they are not in the installation folder, but in the user profile. 

BTW the Newbie UI is not the Classic workspace, that is just a placeholder where the workspaces dropdown list appears since you cannot edit anything in the newbie UI. It is my personal opinion that hiding the Timeline is one of the worst decisions ever made for a UI.

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

The fact that Captivate is not remembering how you set your workspace doesn't necessarily mean it isn't saving your Preferences.  

If you have a particular arrangement of panels and tabs that you prefer, you need to save it as a custom workspace using the options in the dropdown menu right up in the top right corner of the screen where it names the current workspace.  Unless you save a new custom workspace and set that as your default it will just revert to the Classic workspace each time you reboot.

If you want to test whether or not Captivate IS actually saving your Preferences, try changing one of the preferences under Edit > Preferences, for example try changing the Generate Project Backup setting and then reboot to see if whatever you set it to gets retained.

As Lilybiri mentioned, the Preference settings are in your User Profile, where ever that is stored.  Ideally your profile should be on your own computer, not on a LAN drive or roaming profile.  If it's not local, you could have problems with your changes being continually overwritten.  But that problem is actually quite rare nowadays.

[Lilybiri]

Rod, even when you don't create a custom workspace, the change to the Expert UI would be immediately visible if Preferences are changed. The big buttons Libarry and Properties would have disappeared in the Expert UI even in the Classic Workspace (which becomes editable).

On my Surface Pro the Preferences folder is labeled Captivate 11.5 and stored under AppData\Local.  It may be stored under AppData\Roaming in your case. You can check the date to check if the Preferences have been changed. I always keep a saved versio of my Preferences and also of Workspace in case I need to switch to Newbie UI for training purposes (mostly for a short time, just to explain its limitations).  

This older blog explains some of the components of Preferences:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/cativate-8-dot-0-1-install-keep-your-customisation

[RodWard]

Yes Lieve I am aware of all that.  But I think we may be misunderstanding what Megan was saying.

I think she may be thinking that enabling Custom Workspaces in the Preference settings meant that Captivate would remember how she set up the panels each time.   Enabling custom workspaces doesn't automatically mean every change you make to the default workspace gets remembered when you launch Captivate.

I may be incorrect in what I am assuming she's talking about, but first I would like Megan to confirm if changing one of the global preferences is retained.  If it is, then that indicates the 'issue' isn't that it's not saving preferences.  It may simply be that Captivate isn't working the way she expected.

[Lilybiri]

OK, Rod, understand now what you meant. I was also bit confused about 'Project Preferences',  that is why I asked if it was about Global Preferences.

You may be absolute correct. If you never create a custom workspace and save it, you have to set up that workspace every time. There is no real default workspace in my mind? The last used workspace will appear for me. 

Hope with all our questions we'll be able to figure it out. 

[RodWard]

Lieve,

It was ME who marked the answer as correct because Megan's answer today indicated that's what the problem was.  A simple misunderstanding of how Captivate worked.

My apologies if I stepped out of line by marking my own answer as the correct one.  I thought Megan might not know that we usually want to highlight correct answers for future viewers.

[Lilybiri]

No problem Rod, but wanted to know from the OP about  the exact solution and answers to our questions.

It is possible to have multiple correct answers. I am not a big fan of that feature, but sometimes it leads to a more complete answer or alternatives. Sometimes I need also to mark my answer as being correct, which I don't like to do neither but most users don't mark at all.

Sorry, don't misunderstand my comment. I was just thinking about other users trying to find a solution and that is not clear at the moment.

[Megan5ECB]

Thanks. I'm on the other side of the world cooking dinner. I will check out your suggestions tomorrow. Thanks for your support.

[Megan5ECB]

When I opened Catpvivate this morning, my preferences had been saved. I have now created a custom workspace. Thanks Rod and Lieve.

[RodWard]

OK.  That's great to hear.

[Lilybiri]

What was the solution? It looks like you expected Custom workspaces to appear automatically as Rod points out, since you marked that as correct answer. If that is indeed the case - for the sake of other users - could you confirm?