Captivate feature: slide templates

I first used Captivate sometime in 2006. I think my first version was the beta for Captivate 2; I recall using it to create a demonstration of a new feature in Acrobat 8, which was also in beta at the time. I don't remember much about that version except that it was awfully clunky, but that may have been because it was still in beta, and performance tweaks are always the last thing to happen on a new software version.

One of the things that impressed me most about the software, though, was how easy it was to pick up and use. Sans any guidance on how the product worked, and with only a rough notion of what it could do, I very quickly figured out how to record my demonstration, annotate it, and set up timings on certain elements.

Captivate has grown up a lot since then, and there is a lot more to it now than there used to be. Some aspects are even simpler and more intuitive now than they used to be, while others have been moved back out of the limelight. Other than a very brief dabbling in Captivate 7 I haven't actually used the program since version 5.5, and I have to say that some of the new features I uncovered when preparing to write this post looked pretty darn useful. There are a lot of things in the program now that would have made my life simpler back when I was building more e-learning.

For my money, one of the most exciting features in Captivate these days is the slide templates. Like the one below, these templates give you several pre-placed elements which you can quickly replace with images and text, and then move around according to your needs. It's exactly like working with master slide layouts in PowerPoint.

I really wish these had existed a few years ago. What a tremendous time saver this feature is!

Unlike many of the other other commonly used features in Captivate, you won't find these templates on the ribbon. To access them, you need to go to Insert > New slide from and simply pick the design you want from the fly-out menu.

Although most of the templates are fairly simple, Adobe has captured the most commonly used layouts in e-learning courses, making the process of constructing new slides go quite a bit faster. Better still, the templates work with any of the themes and theme color sets available in the program, so instructional designers don't have to go through the tedious process of recoloring all of the text and objects as each slide is created. The most time consuming part of creating any new presentation now will be setting up slide and object timings for animations and audio synchronization, which is as it should be.

While there are several other recent additions to Captivate that make the program more useful or easier to use than in the past, slide templates immediately jumped out at me as something that has significant value to a very broad spectrum of instructional designers. This is a feature that can bring a lot of benefit to a lot of people.