But they have a well-deserved reputation for causing Captivate developers headaches. I have to confess that I love Conditional Actions! They are the unsung misunderstood work-horses of interactive e-learning. I don’t personally use many Standard Actions because I find the next type much more useful. After creating a Standard Action you need to give it a unique name and then trigger (execute) it using any one of Captivate’s dozen or more run-time events. They allow you to execute one or more actions in a sequence. These are re-usable actions you create via the Project > Advanced Actions dialog (or SHIFT + F9). You cannot save and reuse them as you can with the ones we discuss next. Another limitation of Single Actions is that you have to set them up each and every time. If you need to execute multiple actions from a single event, then you need one of the next action types. The main limitation found with Single Actions is that they only allow you to execute one action per run-time event (hence the reason for the word ‘single’ in my preferred name for them). These same actions are also available when creating interactivity with Standard and Conditional Actions. These are the actions you can assign directly to any run-time event via the Properties tab > Actions drop-down list. Here’s a quick summary of what they are and how they differ: Single actionsĪdobe just calls these Actions in the help files, but I prefer to use the term Single Actions because it better describes how they differ from the other types we discuss below. But, for my money, Captivate just seems to take things that little bit further than the others.Ĭaptivate offers four different ways to execute actions and uses the broad term Advanced Actions to encompass them as a whole.
As a professional e-learning developer, I have also used several other rapid e-learning authoring applications to create interactive e-learning. In fact most (if not all) other tools now offer some form of support for basic scripting of interactivity. Of course Captivate is by no means the first or only rapid e-learning authoring tool to have this capability.
It’s really just a simplified method of scripting to customize how Cp e-learning output works at run-time.įor me personally, advanced actions are THE killer feature of Captivate that make it my go-to tool for creating custom interactivity in e-learning courses. This all comes under an umbrella term of “ Advanced Actions”.
Wanting to open up more creative possibilities for e-learning developers, the software architects behind Captivate kindly provided a mechanism allowing non-programmers to customize interactivity of their e-learning content.