Adobe Captivate for Technical Writers
Companies that are looking for instructional designers often require knowledge of and experience with Adobe Captivate. So if you plan to look for work where you’ll need to create lots of training materials for other employees or any kinds of e-learning courses – you’d better get a good handle on this versatile software tool.
It would be nice to enroll in a course and learn it in the classroom doing projects, but so far I haven’t found any in Vancouver. That’s why I suggest you take the same route as with MS Visio – learn it yourself!
What can you do in Captivate?
One of the opinions I heard of this program is: “It’s Flash for the rest of us.” While learning Flash would definitely be a plus, not all of us have patience, determination and time that would be required to master it enough for everyday use in the workplace… Captivate is not as cool and can’t do many things Flash can, but it will help you create movies – an essential part of learning in today’s video saturated virtual world.
So, what kinds of movies can you make in Captivate?
You can go as simple as a slide show demo clip for a product, kind of like a self-running PowerPoint presentation, or as complex as a highly interactive learning video with audio, animations, captions, cursor movement and quizzing capabilities, such as software simulation.
The output formats offered are:
- · Flash movies (.swf)
- · Executable files (.exe)
- · Stand-alone files for Windows, Mac and Linux
- · Handouts – printable MS Word files (.doc/.docx)
Captivate allows you to create movies from scratch, from image files, from existing PowerPoint presentations, or from Captivate templates. Once the basic movie is recorded you can customize it in a variety of ways and add visual elements (captions, highlight boxes, rollovers, text entry boxes, click boxes, animations), customize cursor movement, include audio and sound effects, add interactive tasks (quizzes and questions) – the possibilities are endless.
How can you learn Captivate?
Once again, my advice is to pay a visit to the local library and check out something like Adobe Captivate 4. The Definitive Guide by Brenda Huettner.
Next step would be downloading a trial version from adobe.com and blocking out an hour a day to practice. In a few weeks you’ll learn enough to be able to create your portfolio piece.
Adobe website is a treasure for self-motivated learners! Check out their TV (tv.adobe.com) to find many free learning resources for almost all Adobe products.
You can also find training videos on sites like YouTube (free) or lynda.com (paid subscription – highly recommended!).
The newest version is Adobe Captivate 5, it is available both for Windows and Mac. It supports many kinds of rich media, and is available in multiple languages.
How to include the product of you learning efforts in your portfolio? You can choose the ”screen capture” route for your regular paper-based portfolio; you can embed a movie created in Captivate in your website if you have one (and you should!); or you can burn the Captivate movie (and you whole portfolio) on a CD/DVD to show the prospective employer.
Whatever you chose – you will sure impress your interviewers!
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