Newbie to authoring tools and using Captivate 9. I've set up my slides to display the Next and Back buttons right from the start. During preview, the system needs me to click Play on the playbar in order for animation (images and text boxes) to appear.

[devadzanayai]

I've tried the following solution - Display Next and Back buttons as inert text boxes. Towards the end of the slide superimpose transparent buttons on top. But this obviously doesn't work well because the user will be forced to wait for the slide to play through even when he wants to jump to the next slide. 

[RodWard]

You mention you are new to Captivate.

One of the common newbie mistakes is to use interactive objects such as buttons, but not realise that interactive objects will normally pause the timeline unless set NOT to.  When the timeline pauses, animations stop.

Check your timeline view to look for small vertical lines on the layers for buttons, click boxes, text entry boxes etc.  Those little vertical lines indicate where that object will pause the timeline.

You can change the pausing behaviour in the Timing tab.  If executing Actions, some actions have an option to Continue Playback.

[Lilybiri]

Recently I published an article, summarizing after lot of training and consultancy for Captivate, what the stumbling blocks are for Captivate newbies:

Challenges for Starters - Captivate blog

If you bother about having a look at that article, you'll see that understanding the Timeline is by far the number one on that list. A sequence of 5 articles explaining the Timeline has been published as well. Maybe this one can clarify what you are experiencing at this moment:

Pausing Captivate's Timeline - Captivate blog

I so hope to be able once to present a webinar about pausing the timeline. At this moment I am preparing some use cases to blog about, as demonstrations of pausing issues for newbies. A live event would be a lot better IMO but apparently few users are interested about that, I gave up. Strange, because daily questions appear everywhere based on pausing problems.

If you post a screenshot of the timeline of one of your slides (whole timeline please, you can increase the height to show everything and use the zoom to see the total length of the slide timeline), the problem could be explained based on that timeline.