Question & Knowledge Check Messages & Captions Overlap

[petrk27901450]

When creating a knowledge check slide or question slide and setting up messages such as "retry", "incomplete", "correct" etc it is good practice (at least from my perspective) to have these messages consistent in size and position on the slide. However the trouble with message objects is that they are not listed as a separate item, so they can only be selected by hand, manually. But if I have several of these and they are all on in the same position and therefore overlapping, I cannot select and hide those on top to see and edit the ones on the bottom, if that makes sense. At the moment, the workaround has been to move each message to a different position to prevent any overlap, then once all the messages have been edited (eg. color, font etc), I then need to position them to the exact same place on the location on the slide.

Is there a better workflow to handle this? Or maybe a feature I have not yet discovered.

[RodWard · Accepted solution]

That's the way I do it.  If you discover a better way, please tell everyone here.

[petrk27901450]

It would be easier if each message was made into a separate item, so that each one could still be selected even when they are overlapping.

[RodWard]

They ARE separate items.  They just don't appear on any layers in the Question slide timeline.  That's where the real problem is because it means you have no way to select or hide objects on layers.  Only the top layer is visible and selectable if they are all the same size and occupying the same real estate.

This is the way Captivate is designed to work and has been the case since it began.  Feel free to log an enhancement request with Adobe if you want.  There's a link to the Form page on the Captivate Community page.

[Lilybiri]

I understand your frustration, but maybe shortcut keys for moving the messages can save some time. I always use them to move the message on top upwards a number of times with SHIFT-Up. Then the next one etc... You can nudge them back down with SHIFT-Down. The combination with SHIFT increases the nudge distance to 10px. You can even have a larger moving distance using CTRL-arrow. whih will use the distance set up for the (unuseful) grid, by default that is 16px but you can change it to aother number.

More shortcut keys in this very old post:

Shortcut Keys: Moving and Resizing Objects - Captivate blog