What s in it for You?

What's in it for You?

Although this book can't hope to be Captivate: From A to Z, it is designed to be a handy reference guide if you are familiar with Captivate or RoboDemo. If you aren't, this book will help you develop the skills to use the application to its full potential.

The book is broken into three sections.

The first two chapters comprise the first section and introduce you to the application and how to create a Captivate movie. The first chapter starts with a general overview of the application and the interface. You are shown where various menus are located and, most important of all, the purpose each of the various screens and windows you encounter when you open the application for the first time.

The next chapter essentially pushes you into the proverbial "deep end" of the pool and shows you how to create and edit a Captivate movie. Here you are introduced to the Capture window and many of the powerful features found in the window. After the capture is created, you are shown how the Edit and Story board views in Captivate are used to edit your movie. Along the way you discover how to create and use a Captivate template, set the Captivate preferences, and add playback controls to a movie. You also discover how to add audio to the movie or a slide as well as how to manipulate the captured onscreen movement of the mouse in your movie.

Chapters 3 to 8 form the second section of the book. Each chapter in this section is a detailed exploration of the various tools you use when working with Captivate. As you progress through these chapters you learn how to work with slides, the new Captivate timeline, captions, audio, and how to add audio and Rich Media to your Captivate presentation.

The final section, Chapters 9 to 13, show you how content can be brought into Captivate. Chapter 9, for example, reviews how to create buttons and playback controllers in Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 for use in Captivate. Being a Macromedia product, Captivate also has the capability to "connect" to Flash MX 2004 or Flash MX Professional 2004. Chapter 10 reviews this process.

Chapter 11 deals with the heart and soul of CaptivateeLearning. This chapter shows you how to use the very powerful eLearning features of Captivate ranging from creating true/false quizzes to connecting the results with an eLearning system.

The final two chapters deal with the complexity and the end game of the process. Chapter 12 shows you how to use the MenuBuilder feature of Captivate to link to Captivate movies. In this manner an entire course, consisting of a number of modules, can be broken into a series of small manageable Captivate movies. The last chapter shows you how to get your final product onto the web, onto CD, into a Macromedia Breeze presentation, and even how to FTP the presentation to a web site… all from within Captivate.

As you move through this book, you discover the power of this application. More importantly, you also discover that the amount of fun you can have with this application should be illegal.