Variables in Adobe Captivate act as placeholders for data. The relevant data is associated with the variable during user input or when the output SWF is played. Adobe Capativate supports two types of variables:

• System Variables: These are pre-defined variables, which carry a Captivate movie’s information. In Adobe Captivate, system variables are classified as follows:
• MovieControl: variables for events that control the movie like pause, resume, previous, next slide, and so on.
• MovieInformation: variables related to the movie such as variables for the current slide, current frame, and so on.
• MovieMetaData: variables that provide information about the project such as project name, author, and company.
• SystemInformation: variables that can be picked up from your computer such as current date and current time.
• Quizzing: variables related to quizzing, such as the variables that capture the number of attempts and the percentage of questions answered correctly.

The exhaustive list of System variables is enumerated in this post

• User Variables: Variables that you create and to which you assign a name and value. You can use user-defined variables to store data that is used or updated many times in the Adobe Captivate project. Each variable has a unique name, and a value corresponding to the text that is stored in it. When you modify the value of a variable, the changes to the corresponding text are reflected throughout the project.

How to create user variables:

• Goto ‘Project’ menu.
• Select ‘Actions’ menu-item. The actions dialog comes up what is shown below.

So now you have created your variable. This variable is nothing but a user variable.

Information about system variables:

To know about them you just need to select “System” in the “Type” dropdown in the actions dialog:

Now that you know about User and System variables the next obvious question would be ‘what can I do with these variables?’ Well, you could do many things with these variables, which I shall explain in detail in my future posts. As of now I will tell you two basic usecases for variables:

• Show variables in a Text Caption.
• Show variables in a Drawing Toolbar Objects.

Show variable in a Text Caption:

Consider a case where-in you want to show ‘current slide of the total slide’ information in your project. For example, if your project has 10 slides and if user is on the first slide, this information would look like: 1 of 10.

• Insert a text caption.

Show variables in Drawing Toolbar objects:

• Draw a rectangle.
• Select the rectangle and press “F2”. The TextEdit toolbar comes up.

I am sure that this post would have helped you to break ice with Variables.In my upcoming posts I will tell you about Advanced Actions. Once you get a hold of Advanced Actions, then we would discuss the ‘what and how’ of variables and Advanced Actions in Adobe Captivate 4. Till then I encourage you to try a date with variables!!

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