Slide in captivate stopped until text entry box has been completed

[cassied98210867]

I have a tutuorial on software and I have text entry boxes where they have to type things in. How do I make the slide stop until they enter the text? I have it validated already but if they don't do anything the slide just moves on. 

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Captivate's very nature is to continue to play each slide and automatically transition to the next slide, and so on. If you want to change this behaviour, you need to add an interactive object such as a shape used as a button to pause your course's playback and wait for the learner to press it to continue to the next slide. Text entry boxes have a pause built-in. You will find it located in the On Success action located under the Actions tab. Once the learner has successfully submitted their answer, this action will run. The default is Continue. You can change this to just about any Action in Captivate. For example, you can have it instead jump straight to the next slide, or perhaps have it display a hidden object such as a Next button to take them to the next slide if that's what you want. I hope this helps.

[cassied98210867]

Thank you! I have all of this set up. Sorry for not being clear. In a clickable action the timeline stops and can not move until they click. But for the text entry box it will continue to go if they hit play again on the player even if they didn't enter anything. There are about 500 slides for these simulations so I don't want them to have to enter the answer and then click next. Ideally I just want them to enter the text entry and hit enter and it go to the next slide: this is what happens now but if they want they can hit play without entering anything to continue. A click interaction is different. You can't move on until the click is done. I would like it to be like the click action. 

[Lilybiri]

I will try to guess what you exactly mean, because it is not completely clear. Interactivity (in this case typing in a field) always means that the play head will be paused. For that reason a Text Entry Box has by default a pausing point (at 1.5secs)/

If you used a software simulation, Training or Assessment mode, you normally would not ask this question. The Text Entry Boxes would have been inserted by default when an entry by the learner was expected. Each Text Entry Box would be on a slide, never multiple TEBs on a slide. The TEB is validated by default. The TEB should have always the same setup: a pausing point to pause the slide (see below for a link to a blog), and once the entry has been confirmed by the learner, the Success action is done. That Success action would be 'Go to Next Slide'.

Since you seem to have situation where the slide is NOT paused by a pausing point I assume that you are NOT using a software simulation at all, but have created the tutorial manually. Two possible causes -  if my guess is correct - for your problems:

• You have one Text Entry Box per slide, but you did take out the pausing point using the Timing Properties panel. It looks not very probable, due to the way your question is formulated I suspect that you kept the default setup: TEB has a pausing point, is validated, Success event triggers the command 'Continue' which releases the play head.
• You have multiple TEBs on one slide and the learner is free to choose the sequence to fill in the TEBs. That is a different situation, because you cannot afford to keep the default Success action to be set to 'Continue' if all the TEBs have a timeline duration and a pausing point which is identical. After filling in the first TEB of choice, the play head would be released and the learner cannot fill in the other TEBs. If that is indeed the case you need to edit the Success action for each TEB, set it to No Action (same for Last Attempt if you don't have Infinite attempts). That means that the slide will be paused eternally. You need a Next button for the learner to proceed to the next slide.

There may be another question hidden in your short question: do you perhaps want to avoid that the learner submits an empty field? And did you limit the number of Attempts, and have a Last Attempt action which is set to 'Continue'?

Lot to read, I"m sorry, but it is partially due to the lack of details in your question. If you have time, here are some blogs which are related to your question:

Pausing Captivate's Timeline

Text Entry Boxes - back to basics

[cassied98210867]

Thank you for replying. I apologize for not being clear in my question. I did build it in simulation mode. On the slides that have typing text I put a text entry box over it and have the learner typing in the writing. (There is a voice over that tells them what to put and if they get stuck a post it note that pops up when they click the hint button saying what to write.) The training is for patient records software and I am trying to simulate as if they were actually doing it within the learning environment with someone showing them how. 
    What I am having an issue with is that it works fine if they put in the writing and hit enter. I have it set to go to the next slide. However since the interaction only pauses the timeline the learner can hit play and then the timeline continues and it goes to the next slide without entering anything. Each slide only has one interaction. However with a click box the learner can not advance until they click the box. I would like the text entry box to react the same way.