Program by Day
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Program Titles
“Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist?”
24 Ways to Shut Down The Application and Other Apocryphal Stories
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody
Breathing Life into your Technical Documents using Adobe AIR and the Technical Communication Suite
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User
Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World
Extending the Value of Content in Enterprise Systems with Web Content Management
How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book
Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator
Making XML Technology Accessible
Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse
Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain
On the Road to Modular Training Content
Once Content is in XML. Now what?
Putting Everything Back Together Again
See Dynamic Publishing in Action!
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level
The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint
Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA
Understanding Component Content Management
Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management
Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development
What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash
Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information
Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models
[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
[Workshop] An Overview of RoboHelp 7
[Workshop] Content Engineering
[Workshop] DITA Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL
[Workshop] Introduction to XSL
[Workshop] Making DITA Work For Your Data
[Workshop] Simplified Technical English
[Workshop] Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite
Session Details
[Workshop] Adobe Captivate: The Swiss Army Knife of Visual Help Authoring
Speaker: Neil PerlinTime: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Date: May 9
Track: Post-Conference Workshops
Experience level: All levels
Room: Shaughnessy I Room
Laptop computer required for this session For years, software training was largely text-based… add screen shots in a document, add some text with descriptions and instructions, and voila! The result worked, but how much more effective might it be if someone actually walked you through the steps on the screen? That’s where Adobe Captivate comes in, letting you create that someone.
The primary use of Captivate is to help capture what’s on the screens as you perform a software-based task, such as using a feature in Word. That series of screen shots is effectively a set of frames that users can play back as a movie that shows how to perform the task. To make the movie more useful, you can add explanations and instructions in text or audio form, special effects, even interactivity features that let simulate real software operations. With these features, Captivate lets you create demonstrations, sales training simulations, marketing presentations, tutorials, even fairly sophisticated e-learning. With a few tweaks, you can even use Captivate as an ad hoc usability test recorder.
Captivate movies are Flash-based, but you dont have to know Flash or touch any code. Better still, Captivate is quick and easy to learn compared to traditional CBT authoring tools—two days to get up and running, and cheap —US$700.
This workshop presents a quick overview of Captivates basic features in order to provide an overview of the tool as a whole. In a busy 3 hours, you will:
- Look at uses for Captivate
- Design and plan a movie
- Record a movie to be used as a demonstration
- Enhance a movie with text captions and other frame annotation features
- Publish the finished movie
- Look at some advanced features
The only prerequisites are a basic knowledge of Windows, Internet Explorer, and PC skills in general.
