February 17, 2009

Project Templates – for that ‘rapid’ factor in your eLearning content development

,,,,

One of the many good things in Adobe Captivate is the facility to create Project Templates. Project templates are really useful to create identical projects or identical modules in a project. Their “make once and reuse” aspect ensures consistency and saves development time. So what is new in Adobe Captivate 4’s project templates? PLACEHOLDERS!! Placeholders are objects which can be included on the slides in a project template. These placeholders can be converted to respective Captivate objects while creating a Captivate project from a project template.

 



 
Fig: A small demo which shows how to use an image placeholder and convert it into an Cp object, while creating a project from a template.

Adobe Captivate 4 lets you create the entire project framework via Project Template.  Developers can create project templates which would have placeholders for each of the elements that would appear on the slide. Thereafter, the SME or the ID just needs to convert these placeholders into relevant content in form of Captivate objects. The design and layout is taken care of by the template. To make a project template more effective, you can add slide notes providing information on the recommended types and properties of objects, media, or slides that users are to insert in the placeholders. In addition to placeholders, you can add all Adobe Captivate objects and supported media to project templates. Users have the flexibility to change the objects and the placeholders without any restriction when creating a captivate project from the project template. You can also integrate your powerpoint slides into your template by importing those power point slides. You can also edit them from Captivate itself. Another advantage of having project templates is that you can set your project preferences in your project template file(.cptl) and reuse it. This avoids the pain of setting  preferences for every project. Same applies to the skin editor settings as well. When you create a .cp project from a template, the template file(.cptl) remains untouched.

Click here to view a tutorial on how to use project template to create a project.


Posted by Manish Anand4:02 PM
  • david

    Can a new project template be “applied” to an existing captivate project? That is, say a project was developed with Proj. Template 1. And say another project template 2 was developed separately. can one re-apply Template 2 to a project that was developed with template 1? I’m thinking of Microsoft Word stylesheets.

  • http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate Manish Anand

    “Whether I can apply a Captivate Project Template to an existing Captivate project?” The answer is NO.But since you mentioned Microsoft Word stylesheets, I am contemplating that you want to change the ‘look and feel’ of objects in your Captivate object. YES YOU COULD DO THIS BY USING DESIGN TEMPLATES.With design templates:1. You could create a template file(.cpdt) where in you could set properties for various Captivate objects.2. Thereafter, you could apply this design template file to other Captivate projects.You could find more about design templates and how to use it at:Learn about Design Templates

  • http://arif-ali-saiyed.blogspot.com Arif Ali Saiyed

    Project template is not meant for look and feel,project template is for creating schema of content,for creating a workflow.for look and feel layout off course design template is there.

  • alison59

    My Captivate has no PLACERHOLDER options under INSERT. WTF??

  • Manish Anand

    Hi Alison,What version of Adobe Captivate are you using? Placeholder feature is present in Adobe Captivate 4.For upgrade please go to:http://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?event=displayStoreSelector&keyword=captivate_upg

  • http://www.pmpathway.com Project Management Templates

    Whether you choose to start with a blog or a full blown website, the content you create needs to attract the kind of people you’re looking to do business with. And people expect great content to be delivered in multiple formats, allowing them to consume it on their terms. That means in addition to the traditional whitepapers and slide decks, you need to use a tool like Adobe’s Captivate to create compelling interactive demos and puzzles.

  • http://www.camcha.com chat roulette

    I liked your theme Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. ~Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

  • C Hristinaweberhere

    Thanks all over again. I am not sure the things that I might have done without the type of creative concepts shown by you about my subject matter.
    romuzica

  • Subscribe to RSS feeds
  • Loading

  • Categories

  • Archives

  • Authors

  • Recent Comments

    • Wahed: HI My is Wahed I want Progress Bar normal slides and accept flash flies Thanks
    • Wescravn: Hi, Can you please share your swf and .cptx files? My email-id : wescravn@hotmail.com Thanks
    • Rhonda Neswald-potter: Hello, I would like to have different quizzes for specific branched areas of a tutorial. Is...
    • Shirley Lacy: The latest version of Presenter is installed on my machine and it was working with Powerpoint 2010....
    • Magic: Yeah, I discovered that as well. at least going forward I’ll know to have the backup setting on. Too...

  • Captivate & eLearning Videos

    Subscribe to Adobe eLearning on YouTube.

    Check out the latest eLearning Videos on AdobeTV

  • Live and on-demand eSeminars

    Attend a free eSeminar to learn how to create engaging eLearning content with Adobe Captivate 5.