Converting to responsive projects in Captivate 2017

[donnag68]

Hello! 

My company currently uses Captivate 2017. We have dozens of existing courses, some created in older versions and updated to Cap 2017, some created more recently in Cap 2017. We are exploring converting these courses to responsive courses, but have questions on the best way to go about this.

Most of them are narrated courses with images and animations. We also have text-based courses with images/animations but no narration. When we open an existing course and select "save as responsive", the output usually doesn't layout correctly or resize neatly. We have tried "Suggest Fluid Boxes" without success. 

Would it be easier (or faster) to start from scratch with a blank project, add our fluid boxes, and then copy/paste our text or image objects from the existing older course into the fluid boxes? 

Help! What other advice would you offer? 

[Lilybiri]

To be honest, the workflow to convert an existing non-responsive project to a Fluid Boxes project is only working for very simple projects. I never succeeded any conversion. Similar to what you experienced.

Recommendation? First of all: reflect if you really need a responsive project for all of them? Publishing to rescalable HTML output could be the easiest solution. If you really need output which is also working in Portrait mode and on the small browser resolutions of smartphones, you need to start from scratch a Responsive project (not a Blank project, what a bad terminology for a non-responsive project). Set up a custom theme like you probably did for the non-responsive projects. Such a theme will be different, because the master slides can have fluid boxes which will be inherited by the slides.  I hope that you have Quiz text in a GIFT (or CSV) file to make importing them easier. Copy/paste text may not always work well, you would need non-formatted text since the styles for a responsive projects are different. For the images: you can use the Library of the old projects as external library. If some of the images are imported using the Photoshop import source file, eventual edits will be made easier.

Fluid boxes workflow needs a different mindset, do not underestimate the learning curve if you need to start. Although I had at least a decade of experience with Captivate, it took me a couple of months to get to grip with Fluid Boxes.  Many features allowed in non-responsive projects are not allowed in normal fluid boxes (avoid Static fluid boxes), that can be very frustrating (no click boxes, no highlight boxes, no stacking whatsoever in a fluid box). 

Not often mentioned: besides Fluid Boxes you can still use the older Breakpoint views workflow to create a responsive project. I tried to compare workflows in an older blog:

http://blog.lilybiri.com/fluid-boxes-or-breakpoint-views

You can find more articles on my blog about Fluid Boxes workflows.

[donnag68]

Thank you for your advice, lilybiri!

As a follow-up question, is the workflow any easier in Captivate 2019? Should we consider upgrading?

[Lilybiri]

Yes, I would definitely recommend to upgrade to 11.5 which is under CP2019;here are 2 reasons:

• It is possible to use Position Properties, inherited from Breakpoint Views for individual slides where the Fluid Boxes are not very well suited. I think about slide video (eventually interactive).
• You get access to the Quick Start Projects, many have both a responsive (fluid boxes) and a non-responsive version. Some have good and useful themes (not all...sorry). Exploring those themes or editing them into a Custom theme could save you time.

There may be more reasons, these are just personal ones directly getting into my mind.  Setup of Fluid boxes has improved as well since 11.0. Still it will need some learning efforts.