Description
How to import a PowerPoint into Captivate. PowerPoint is a powerful graphic design tool and often it is easier to design in PowerPoint, then bring into Captivate. But there are a few tricks to pay attention to.
Video transcript below.
Video Transcript
Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt.com. Just wanted to show you, really quickly, the feature of importing PowerPoint into Captivate. Specifically I was using the display board templates where I created these three different views. I have another video where I show you how to actually build these out.
Essentially they’re built as several different assets as, you know, a person, a screen, kind of this wall in the background, floor. But Captivate – and let me pull up Captivate really quickly. So if I pull up Captivate, you’ll see, when I go to create a new file, under create new there is from Microsoft PowerPoint.
Click on that, it’s going to allow me to select the PowerPoint file, and then it will pull it in and do some conversion. It’s actually – it’s pretty nice. But there is some tricks that you need to know with how to setup your PowerPoint files. So let’s actually go ahead and get into that.
It’s going to convert whatever was on the slide into a single image. So there’s some things that you want to do to maintain flexibility. So when I’m in this slide here, what I would do I’d keep my selection and visibility pane open, and I would hide all the components that I want to be able to customize.
So I like to be able to have the flexibility to add whatever character I want, whatever character expression I want, and in Captivate 6 there is some options where there is some characters that are built in. So that’s great.
So I’m going to hide this person, and I’m also going to hide the word content here, and that content text, and then I’m going to back and do the same thing, hide these two elements. And it’s helpful if you name these in PowerPoint so that you can find – you can find what they are very quickly. Like I know the content text is going to hide that.
So now I have these three slides, and I like to bring these three slides in, so I’d go ahead and I would save out this file, and then when I go to Captivate, I would just create a new project and I’d go from Microsoft PowerPoint, and there is my chalkboard template that I want to do, so I double click that.
And it starts doing a little bit of work here. Okay so it’s going to ask me what the project size and all of that, I’m just going to leave everything as the presets. It asks me which slides I want to include, and I want to include them all. And I actually like to change it to automatically, just because otherwise it puts a click box on the screen, and I don’t really want that right now.
And I’m going to make them not linked for right now. So I have everything selected, default settings, automatic advance, not linked, and then I click okay. So now you’ll see that we’ve inserted the slides from PowerPoint and it’s going to show up, and here are the three different views that we had, the zoom out, the transition view, and the zoom-in.
So now we can edit the various components that were – that were pulled out before which would be the character and the text. So to insert a character, within Captivate 6 there is pre-built character – or characters included here, so go to insert, characters, and you can scroll between characters.
And I’m going to choose Steve here, and let’s drop this picture of him pointing, and there he is. Now if you want to scale him, make sure you keep the constraint proportions locked by holding shift as you scale it up. And another quick pointer here would be, when you click off the image and when you’re doing the quality here, you want to change it off of low.
A lot of times the transparency and the hair gets messed up, so switch that over to high, and you’ve got that there. And now you can also just insert whatever text you want, so I would insert a standard object, and you can just add some text, and now we can make that bigger. Change the color red or whatever. Let’s go ahead and drag that around.
Let’s change that to white. But anyways, you can see that just within Captivate here, you can take PowerPoint slides, hide the elements that you don’t want to be showing up, convert it over into Captivate, and then add the elements that you want to add which would be the person and the content that you are going to put on the screen.
[end of audio]
