Adobe Captivate’s Worst Feature

By: Justin Ferriman April 20, 2012
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Adobe Captivate is a great tool with tons of functionality, but you should absolutely avoid this one feature at all costs, unless you enjoy massive headaches and loads of rework!

With so many learning tools out there, it is common to integrate a few of them for online learning. For example, in the past I have used Articulate and Adobe Captivate to create an elearning course on new processes and software. I find that presenting process flows and information in Articulate is loads easier than doing the same in Captivate. This is generally because of Articulate being a PowerPoint add-on, which allows for rapid development (and multiple developer integration) in a fairly seamless fashion.

Now I imagine that Adobe Captivate would prefer that developers ignore Articulate altogether and simply use their PowerPoint import function instead – and speaking from experience, this is quite possibly the worst feature in the entire suite of Captivate.

You see, when you import your PowerPoint, you essentially link the separate PowerPoint file to the Captivate file. If you update your PowerPoint, Captivate *should* update on its own… but that is usually never the case.

More often than not, you will find that the link is broken between the two. If you try to open PowerPoint within Captivate, you will encounter performance issues and other various bugs (i.e. all your slides going completely blank).

Worst of all, if you use this feature, you will encounter more severe glitches as your presentation gets larger. If you must import a PowerPoint, expect these issues to arise, especially if your presentation is more than 35 slides. I recall a few courses that had to be sent to Adobe helpdesk to be “recovered” because they experience a random fatal error.

Long story short, my team and I spent a lot of time patching up little glitches to the point where updating a spelling error in the course took nearly 15min. In the end, we switched all our eLearning over to Articulate (after completing the work in Captivate) because it was too difficult to transition to the client in its current state.

We didn’t do this because Articulate is the “better” tool (I actually prefer Captivate), but Captivate is not meant for PowerPoint, and this feature seemed like it was added hastily to “appease” the PowerPoint junkies out there.

Do yourself a favor, do not use the PowerPoint import function in Captivate, at least not in the current version available (v5.5 as I write).  Stick with Captivate for software/screen demonstrations, what it was initially designed to do.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter