Create a project from PowerPoint - Captivate Tutorial

- [Instructor] For many people who've never used E-learning authoring software like Captivate 2019, the go-to tool for presenting is likely PowerPoint, and you may have PowerPoint presentations that you put a lot of work into, well the good news is you can re-use that content here in Captivate, you can bring slides into a project, you can even start a brand new project from a PowerPoint presentation. That's what were going to do in this movie. You can see here at the start screen, with New selected, there is an option to start a new project from PowerPoint. Clicking this and then selecting Create allows you to go browsing for those PowerPoint presentations. Now here's the trick. Automatically, if you're working with the newer format of PowerPoint presentation with the extension pptx or ppsx for slideshows, automatically those slides will be converted to the older ppt format. Now when that happens, your presentation may be stripped of things that didn't exist in the older version of PowerPoint, for example if you were using media, they might get converted to images, if there are certain special effects you're using in your newer version of PowerPoint presentation, that didn't exist in the older version, you lose those too. So my recommendation is to do the converting yourself. That way you won't be surprised when everything's converted for you and brought into your Captivate project. So, as you can see in the chapter two folder of the exercise files, I have one for you, Red 30 Orientation, and it is an older version with the extension ppt, that's the old PowerPoint '97 to 2003 format, and by doing the conversion yourself in PowerPoint, you'll know exactly what you're losing in the way of content and special effects. So with this selected, all we have to do now is click open. You can see there is some conversion, the conversion is from PowerPoint to Captivate at this point, there's no converting to ppt because we already have ppt files. So once all the slides are converted to Captivate, they show up here in thumbnail representations, each one is checked off to be included in your new project. You can see the name's going to be the same as the PowerPoint name, Red 30 Orientation, we can keep that, you can see the width and height there are different presets if you want to change that, depending on your planned output for example, I'm going to leave what I see here, 1280 by 720, maintain aspect ratio is another option, clicking this will always maintain that aspect ratio when adjustments are made. I'm going to deselect that and keep the default. Also down below, you can see a slider here where we can go through each of the slides, if there's something we don't want to include we simply click the check box, it's no longer checked off, and will no longer be brought into the project. I'm going to keep everything checked off though and just browse through them. So 14 slides in all. You'll also see that by default, down below, to move from one slide to the next in your Captivate project, you'll click with your mouse. On mouse click, and all that means is that something's going to be overlaid each slide where you can click to move to the next slide, it's called a click box, you'll see this happen momentarily. And the slides are linked from one to the next, it's linear in fashion. All we have to do now is click OK. If you prefer to use slide timings, clicking the drop down you can see Automatically means those click boxes won't be added to each slide, and there will be timings assigned that you can adjust that will automatically move from one slide to the next, to the next. I'm going to keep it on mouse click and click OK. So at this point now the slides are being added to your brand new project that's being created and it will be based on the PowerPoint presentation and each of the slides that was going to be included, in this case all of our slides. So first thing you can see down the left hand side are the thumbnails representing each of the slides we just brought in from PowerPoint. Over here, you can see the slide itself and as you move your mouse around you can see it's actually the pointing finger, that's because there's something called a click box that's added to the top of every slide. It's invisible, but when we go to preview this, just clicking anywhere on the slide will move us from one to the next, to the next. So that's what's added for you. Obviously we can make adjustments to how we navigate our new project, we can take those click boxes out and add our own if we want to, these are all things that we can do once we have the PowerPoint presentation imported into Captivate, but we just got a nice head start thanks to the ability to create a new project from a PowerPoint presentation.