Project structure

[sebrame]

My current project is a rather large one, at least in my experience, and I am wondering about how to structure it. The project is broken into 7 sections, each section having ~25 slides. I'm wondering if it may be better to have a separate project for each logical section, and use the main menu buttons(I'm not using TOC) to 'Open another project'. Another factor is that each section's slides are very similar, so I might lose the ability to Duplicate slides in order to create another section's slides.

I can't find a lot of current info online about the 'Open another project' action. Just wondering if this method is preferable over having one really big project.

Thoughts?

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

If your project is going to be delivered from an LMS as SCORMs then you really should not be trying to have one of the SCO modules call another SCO module of the course.  SCORM's rules don't really allow this because it's supposed to be the LMS that launches each module in response to some user action such as clicking  link to the next module in the SCORM player TOC.

If you are NOT considering delivery and tracking of the course by an LMS then you could have one of the modules act as a doorway to the other ones with buttons that open each module but you would be better advised to use the Opern URL or File action and specify a relative link to the HTM or HTML file that launches the other module.

The Open Another Project action in Captivate is often misunderstood and is in my opinion pretty useless.  It will expect you to be publishing your project output into the same folder where the project CPTX file is located and will create a link to an HTM file at that location.  Since most Captivate developers would wisely keep their CPTX files in separate locations to the published output the Open Another Project action almost always fails to deliver expectations.

[sebrame]

Not using an LMS, it will run from a basic web server, so that's not an issue. I guess I'll go ahead and build it all in one project while maybe testing the 'separate project for each segment' method at some point. I was mainly concerned with how well Captivate handles a project with a large amount of material. Guess I'll find out. Just being able to group the slides and then collapse the groups makes slide management easier. What would help would be the ability to hide/show multiple slides at once, or at least hide/show a group of slides. Had to do some troubleshooting using process of elimination in this first section, and hiding each slide individually became a pain. Can't wait til I have to do that on 100+ slides!

[AskingAboutJS]

"Large amount of material"

The published project itself should be fine.

Working on the project while you have a million objects... that becomes slower and more painful as you add more and more.

That's just from my experience having only a 30-slide project with around 30 pictures and shapes per slide.

[sebrame]

Yep, exactly what I'm worried about. However, the machine I'm on was designed for video editing and it's fairly beefy, so maybe I wont bog down too much. If it gets critical, I can move to another beefier machine or break the project up as originally stated.

[AskingAboutJS]

It can be done, and data can be carried over using the URL, but I've never done it myself.

As for "duplicting", that works. I have copied and pasted from an old project to a new project.