I needed to convert my 65 page PowerPoint to into captivate. I found it was a very challenging task because it simply imported every slide as a flat image with no independent objects to manipulate (like text boxes, images,etc.)
So I did some research and found that Storyline 360 converts the slides into their program and retains the independence of the objects. Great! Woo hoo! Win for team Todd!!! Well no… I had to learn a new application, and finesse the objects translated back into the right places. Shrink text, images, color updates, etc. So it was a ton of work this way too. Although Storyline does give you a better start in my opinion.
Then I had an idea! What if I copy and paste the text from PowerPoint into a text box in Captivate.
IMPORTANT! Never just copy the full text box from PowerPoint or it will paste as an image of text and not the actual text.
Once over in Captivate you can format the text how you like and save as a style for repeated use. Then you can also convert objects from PowerPoint that I don’t want to create from scratch in captivate by saving the object as an image from PowerPoint. (in PowerPoint you right click the object you want to convert into a image and select save as image).
Then I set up styles along the way and began to convert the PowerPoint manually page by page into Captivate. Well this workflow worked really good. It was better than simply plastering a static images of all my slides into captivate and definitely less time than trying to learn a new tool and finesse their conversion of PowerPoint.
So in 1 day I was able to convert a 65 page PowerPoint into an interactive Captivate project by taking the time to manually handle each slide. After a little time, you start to reuse your captivate slides and then it makes things even faster!
Once I got the assets over from PowerPoint to Captivate, I was able to add interactivity, use advanced scripts, etc. so now my PowerPoint is a fully interactive and easily manageable captivate project.
This is just my 2 cents on how I approached this task. Thought I would share :=) In case this helps others who are considering how to approach this task.
If I am starting a project where I am interviewing SMEs for the learning content and the SME doesn’t have any documented content, then I will start from scratch in Captivate. But a great deal of the time, SMEs have created the content in a PPT. Instead of having to recreate everything that an SME has already put together, is there some way that I can import the PPT slide objects into Captivate and keep the objects independent and editable? In a 50 slide presentation, there could easily be 75 to 100 objects that I could reuse…..text and graphics. All that is needed is to import these objects over onto Captivate slides automatically with one click. Then, I can use Captivate’s strong features to create the interactivity, animation, and other elements of instruction. There is another authoring software that I have used from time to time called Active Presenter and it works well at importing PPT objects, but I’d prefer to use Captivate.
I had explained a possible workflow in my previous answer, you must have missed it.
A ppt-file is in reality a zipped folder (same with a cptx-file). If you rename the extension to zip you can unzip the folder and extract the assets you want to use in a Captivate project. Import all those assets in the Library of a new Captivate project, and you are ready to go. For the Layout: build a custom theme with color palette, object styles and master slides, using the PPT presentation as sort of a guideline. Then use the assets from the Library to create the CP project. Also possible for a responsive project.
May I offer some more tips? I never use the PPT import at all, they are not converted to flat image but to movie slides, which menas that the animations from PPT will be mimicked. But you are totally correct that CP’s worfkflow is not meant for further editing.
Each PPT (and CP-file) is in reality a zipped folder. If you cange the extension ppt(x) to zip you can unzip that folder. You will find a lot of the assets which you can then import into the Captivate Library of a new project wit the wanted resolution. Text must indeed be undormatted, since Captivate is a style-based application (with only object styles). Then set up a Theme in Captivate: Theme Colors palette, object styles, master slides, eventually skin and Recording default styles.
Storyline does a better job with PPT slides, but one of the lacking features IMO is a Library which is great for reusability.
Thanks for sharing the process.
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