Introducing Captivate variables - Captivate Tutorial

- [Instructor] Variables in Captivate act as placeholders for data. They're used for both storing and retrieving information such as names or numbers that you can reuse throughout a project. Captivate has two different kinds of variables that you can utilize, user-defined variables and system variables. A user-defined variable would be one, that you, as the developer create. An example would be a variable to hold a user's name so you can display it on various slides within your project or on a course certificate to personalize it. Another example would be a variable that keeps track if a button has been clicked or a slide has been visited. You could also use user-defined variables to calculate something. An example could be a mortgage calculator where you collect several pieces of data and then use those to calculate what a monthly payment would be. System variables refer to already existing pieces of information about Captivate that you can access. There are two categories of system variables, those that allow you to change or control their value, and others that are read-only and can be used only to display content. System variables where you can change or control the value are movie control variables. For example, if you set the system variable called CP Command Mute to one, the project will be muted. If you set it to zero, it will unmute. Other movie control variables do things like go to a particular slide, show or hide the closed captioning, or enable the play bar. System variables that are read-only can be divided into the subcategories of movie information, movie metadata, system info, quizzing variables, and mobile. I don't want you to worry about these too much, but here's a quick overview. Movie information variables provide information about your project. An example is called CP Info Current Slide, which tells you what slide the user is currently on. Movie metadata variables list information about a project. One example is CP Info Project Name, this displays the project name that you define in the project properties when you go to the file menu and then project info. System information variables provide information about the system your project is running on. For instance, CP Info Current Date String will tell you what the current date is according to your computer. Quizzing variables allow you to access information such as the number of quiz attempts, score, or the number of questions that your user has left unanswered in a project. Finally, CP Info Geolocation is a mobile variable that allows you to access the physical geographic location of a user. To get a sense of the available system variables in Captivate in a blank project, go to the project menu, and then choose variables. From the type dropdown, choose system, and here are all of the different system variables that are available. Even better is this help page on the Adobe website that lists all of the system variables and a description of what they are. So again, there are user-defined variables and system variables, and we'll work with both in the upcoming videos.