Chapter 1. The Captivate Work Environment

Before you start creating Captivate movies and adding them to Flash MX 2004 presentations, your Web site, or other media, it's useful to familiarize yourself with your working environment. This way, you can quickly identify many of the tools, panels, menus, and other features of the application.

When you open a Captivate movie, you are placed immediately into the Captivate authoring environment. This environment is divided into two distinct panels:

• The Storyboard View panel enables you to perform a variety of tasks or edit an existing movie.

• The Edit View panel enables you to select various slides in the movie and perform specific tasks upon each selected slide.

The Captivate Metaphor

Remember those flipbooks you had when you were a child? Each page contained a piece of an animation. You would flip through the pages, and the objects on the page would appear to move.

This is exactly how Captivate works. Each slide of a Captivate movie contains content. When the computer flips through each slide, the content appears to move. This is why, as you move through this book, you will discover how important slides are in the Captivate authoring process.

This chapter's quick tour of the Captivate authoring environment will familiarize you with the location and use of many of the interface features.

Tip

• If you are opening Captivate projects created in older versions of RoboDemoV5 or lowerthe .ncp and .rd file extensions have changed to .cp (a Captivate file) or .cpt (a Captivate template). If you open an older file in Captivate, the .ncp extension changes to the newer .cp extension.