From Storyline to Captivate

Recently I’ve had to learn Captivate for a new project, and as a seasoned user of Storyline, I’m here to help any other programmers through this transition between elearning authoring tools. Captivate can be frustrating for a user who is used to Storyline, as Captivate is less intuitive, has more menus, fewer animations and quizzing options, and some other differences that made it difficult for me to make this jump.

To start, I found it was more difficult and time consuming that usual to use slides from previously programmed Captivate elearning projects in another project. It seems I’d been taking Storyline’s Import feature for granted that it would be possible to import slides in Captivate. It turns out slides can be slowly copied and pasted one at a time in Captivate, and even then it cannot copy over custom variables or Advanced Actions.

Small differences that were also stumbling blocks for me:

The length of any slide in Storyline can be edited by dragging the end to the desired time, while Captivate’s main slide timeline has to be selected before you can edit the slide length.
Objects in Captivate have to be converted to buttons to be able to have a mouseover state; called RollOver in Captivate, Hover in Storyline. Hover states can be added to any object in Storyline. Also, to access States in Captivate, you have to select your object, and select State View from the Properties panel.
There are fewer quiz interaction types, and no way to convert an existing slide into a freeform quiz slide in Captivate.

Storyline's Timeline