Captivate vs. uPerform, publishing as Word docs
I just figured out a couple of shortcuts for making a simulation into a blog post, so I'm going to document the process here to help cement it in my mind. But I think I'll post that tomorrow; first I'm going to talk about two different authoring tools.
Software Demo Tools: Ancile uPerform vs. Adobe Captivate
At my current instructional design position, I'm using Adobe Captivate, and a weird one called Ancile uPerform. It's "weird" because it's not very common. I'd never heard of it prior to my current job. If you don't have access to Ancile's online "intelligence hub," it's difficult to find much detailed troubleshooting information about it, or at least – compared to Captivate.
Even with Captivate, though, if you want to know something really specific, it can be hard to find that information unless you can come up with the optimal google search terms. This can be a challenge if you don't even know what the action is called.
I have been familiar with Captivate for several years now, but making these kinds of tutorials is pretty new to me. With most authoring tools, especially Adobe tools, I've observed that someone can say that they "know" any one of them, but for most people this means that they know how to do...whatever they need to know how to do to perform their jobs, and probably not a whole lot more than that.
For example, I have a limited knowledge of Illustrator, even though it's the first tool I ever learned how to use in Adobe Creative suite. I've only used it professionally one time, for one very short project, and that was about eight years ago. My knowledge of InDesign is much more broad, but even still it's confined to things that I needed to do for my job, or for school. Incidentally, I learned InDesign in Graphic Design school in 1999, which was the year it came out. That could make me sound like an expert, until I explain that there have been years-long gaps between projects where I actually used it.
I sure do wish that every project manager and person-who-hires-contractors understood that most people who "know" a particular tool really only "know" how to do whatever-they-have-done-before in that tool, and even then they only "know" it if they've done it pretty recently. I always do try to disclose this interviews, yet sometimes it still seems to escape the realization of folks I've worked for when I tell them I need to get my proverbial sea legs back before I should be totally set loose with no supervision on a particular tool. Cuz, y'know,...Use it or lose it.
Captivate is possibly the most exemplary tool to demonstrate this principle. For a while I was conflicted about even putting it on my resume for this very reason, although I do feel reasonably confident about it since my last two projects – though admittedly I'm not confident about everything in Captivate, because I'd say there are three things I know how to do really well, one thing I can do pretty well, and then a whole lot of things I've never even attempted, or probably don't even know about yet.
I am confident about including uPerform on my resume, however, because uPerform only has a handful of potential outputs. Captivate can do all kinds of fancy things, but uPerform's capabilities are more specialized. (Which, I guess, is just a nice way of saying "limited.")
Despite being virtually unheard of, uPerform is not a bad tool at all. It's much easier to use than Captivate, though the overall capabilities are much more...yes, we'll go with "specialized." Ultimately though it's probably a better option for non-Instructional Designers who want to make a whole lot of software simulations/walkthroughs in a short amount of time, because it's so much more user-friendly.
Captivate is a better tool for more elaborate courses, and for auto-playback simulations that can do cool things. It's got a lot of bells and whistles, which is exactly why it's so difficult to become proficient in using it.
Both of these tools can make Word document tutorials from software simulations. Both make Word outputs that are aesthetically really ugly (though Captivate is more customizable, you don't have a ton of options for design), and both have a variety of pros and cons.
Before I understood how to use Captivate and its ilk for this purpose, I made quick-n-dirty job aids for co-workers in a very slow and clunky way. This was to use Snagit, PrintScreen, or my Windows Snipping Tool to take a bunch of screenshots of the process I wanted to document, save each screenshot as a .jpg or .png, and then manually paste the screenshots into a Word doc. After painstakingly organizing and formatting the screenshots in my doc, I added highlight boxes or callouts, along with text to explain the process.
Predictably, this took a lot of time. I mean, it's fine for a three-step process, but for a 30-step process...not so much.
For the record, a good Instructional Designer knows that a tutorial probably shouldn't have more than say, 25 steps. But also for the record, in the Real World, Instructional Designers frequently have to create simulations, walkthroughs, tutorials, job-aids, etc., that are like 80+ steps, because that's the drinking-from-the-firehose-at-all-times world we live in, sorry. Yes, I concur that superlong tutorials are horrible, but go tell it to every project manager I've ever had.
Individually screenshotting 80+ screens, formatting all in Word and then writing out the instruction manually...is s-l-o-w. I have certainly done it before, and when I was a tech writer I put together documents with actual photos that had to be shot, uploaded from the camera, sifted through, selected, and then edited in Photoshop, all before I could even begin the fun of fighting with them in Word. To my knowledge, that can't yet be avoided with actual photographs. But I would rather not have to do that with screenshots, if there's a better way.
Hey guess what: there IS a better way!
With a tool like Captivate or uPerform, you can forget about making manual screenshots. You just open your tool, fire up the software you want to document, and click a "record" button on a little widget. It's not a video recorder however; if you're thinking of something like Camtasia, that's not what we're talking about here. In fact, a software simulation recorder doesn't start doing anything until you perform some action with either your mouse or your keyboard. Rather than a recording device, it's an automatic screenshot-capturing device.
As you go through the step-by-step process in your software, the tool automatically takes a screenshot every time you make a mouse or keyboard action, along with automatic highlight boxes and callouts. To create the callouts, the tool makes its best guess of what action you performed, (click, scroll, press return, etc.) and generates caption text accordingly. When you are finished recording, you click the "stop" button on your recording widget, and the tool opens an editing module where you will find a chronological library of your screenshots and the accompanying text.
Of course, you have to edit the crap out of everything, because the tool's "best guess" of what action you performed in your demo is sometimes really weird and wrong. The text may be awkwardly worded at best, and the callouts are sometimes nowhere near the correct place on the screen image. You will inevitably have to delete a lot of slides, since even the most seasoned user of any software is going to throw in a few false moves here and there. If you make even one wrong move in your software, the "incorrect" slides that will need to be deleted can add up fast as you fumble around. But still, these tools perform a huge chunk of the work for you. The editing will take you some time, but making a software sim is far superior to capturing individual screenshots with Snagit.
These kinds of projects can be published in a few different ways. A software simulation is usually an .html or .swf file, which can be published on the web as a rudimentary little "video" of the action happening – the mouse pointer floats around the page and shows you where to click in the software, or what to type in which editable field. You have the option to publish your project to play automatically, or the sim can be made interactive so that the user must physically click each highlight box in order to advance to the next slide or activity.
You can also publish the simulation as a Word doc. These are useful if you want to have paper handouts in a live training, or to store as pdf's on an LMS as part of a training reference library. When published as a Word doc, the tool automatically saves each screenshot as an image in the Word doc, and generates all the associated caption text.
Each of the tools I've been using has different idiosyncrasies as to how these Word docs ultimately look, and both have some similarities, for better or for worse.
Both tools are pretty limited in your capacity to edit the images. The callouts and highlight boxes are not saved as individual objects that you can manipulate – they are static on the image. If you want to edit them, they must be edited in the project itself rather than in the Word doc. Captivate can be set to omit some of the objects before you publish it. I'm not sure about uPerform.
Both Ancile uPerform and Adobe Captivate also publish the Word doc with the instructional text BELOW the screenshot image, which bugs me. I feel like the reader's instinct is to expect the text to be ABOVE the image, but maybe that's just me (well, me and some of my co-workers who are also pretty bugged by this). The Word doc is editable, so you can move your captions around if you want, but I haven't figured out a way to force the source files to publish it any other way. It should be noted, though, that I still have a lot to learn about templates, so this isn't to say that a method doesn't exist.
Above is a side-by-side comparison of a tutorial I made in uPerform about how to deal with some obnoxious Word formatting, versus a tutorial I made in Captivate about...how to use uPerform. (Yeah, so these things can get pretty meta when you're an Instructional Designer teaching other Instructional Designers how to use Instructional Design tools!)
Captivate's software simulations look better than uPerform's and have a lot more capabilities, but uPerform makes slightly nicer-looking Word docs than Captivate. I think it's because uPerform is designed somewhat more for this purpose than Captivate. I like that uPeform automatically generates a number on the text of each step with a corresponding number on an arrow pointing to the location where the mouse or keyboard action takes place. Granted, these arrows are TINY, and it's not always perfectly clear what they are pointing to, but I still like that it does this automatically. Conversely, the only arrows you can use in Captivate are huge and ugly, and must be manually placed.
Captivate generates a step number above the slide, rather than alongside the text. Note in the image below, in my template or in some other setting, Captivate is set up to generate the step number twice, and I am not sure why. Additionally, for some reason the slide images in all of my Captivate Word docs have been "squished," with the text centered but the image justified to the left. This could also be a template issue, which I don't yet know how to fix; template stuff is currently a little above my pay grade (though hopefully not for long).
Also, Captivate publishes the caption text on the screenshot image, along with identical "step" text below the image. This is redundant and annoying, but the caption text cannot be deleted from the screenshot once the project is published, it's now a static part of the actual image.
UPDATE: you can eliminate that redundancy if you just uncheck a box when you publish the sim as a Word doc. More on that later.
The caption text in the doc will keep the same formatting you applied to it when you formatted your simulation. In this case, I had formatted the caption text to be centered, so it is aligned to the center in the doc as well. Until I figure out whether this can be fixed in the template or publish settings, if I want to fix that, I have to manually edit it in my Word doc.
So, yes, there are ways to adjust some of these settings before you publish your Captivate project as a Word doc to eliminate or change this stuff, but I haven't figured out every possibility yet. It's not for lack of trying/googling. People who say that Captivate has a steep learning curve are not kidding around.
uPerform automatically generates tables that show you examples of what to type in which field, which is nice when you are making a demo of software that requires a lot of information to be typed into a lot of fields. The below example shows a simple table with just one "typing" step, but these tables can have multiple cells in them to accommodate for filling in multiple fields on the same page.
These tables can be easily edited in the Word doc, though they are a pain to edit in the actual simulation. I'll spare you the details other than to say that it takes about four clicks to find the dialog box where you can edit this text, and the process is not even slightly intuitive.
The same goes for some of the other weird settings in uPerform, but just as with Captivate, some of that stuff can be changed in the template. Changing the template in uPerform is no less challenging than it is in Captivate, however.
One of my pet-peeves about uPerform is that you can't "hide" slides, so if you want to get rid of stuff, you have no choice but to delete it. It makes me nervous to do this in case I change my mind about a step later, so I like that Captivate gives you the option to just turn the slide off and virtually "set it aside" in case you want to use it later.
Meanwhile, one of my pet-peeves about Captivate is that it doesn't have a feature that lets you insert more recorded steps into a simulation by virtue of one easy command, as does uPerform. In Captivate, you have to create a whole new sim and then copy-paste the steps over from one doc to another.
So, both tools have stuff about them that is cool, and both tools have stuff about them that is dumb.
Publishing Sims as Word Docs
It's easy to publish a uPerform simulation as a Word doc. You just go to "File > Publish," and then a dialog box with a bunch of options and settings pops up. You make sure to select "Work Instruction" and then select "word" under that header, and it will publish your Word doc in a separate folder on your hard drive. (You can also publish it to uPerform's server, but that's a whole 'nother facet of uPerform that I'm not going to get into).
Publishing a Captivate simulation as a Word doc is a little more of an opaque process. Instead of anything that looks like "Publish," you first have to go to "Print." This is completely non-intuitive, just like a lot of other things about Captivate, because in many cases I don't actually want to "Print" anything, I just want to save my project as a Word doc. Sometimes it seems like Captivate was deliberately designed to be mysterious so that non-Instructional Designers won't even try to use it, but I mean I guess it's job security for me, so...? Okay?
At any rate, you're going to go to "File > Print" from the dialog box, then under the "Type" drop-down menu you will choose "Handouts."
From this dialog you also can select a bunch of different options for your project, though I find these kind of limited, because "Include Objects and Questions" is pretty broad and I wish I could fine-tune it a little bit. Oh wells. There are so many things I wish Captivate would do that it doesn't do, I could practically keep a running list. (Oh look, I'm hardly the only one who has these complaints, though maybe this guy is a bit harsh).
So, once you've worked through your frustrations at Captivate's shortcomings and decided what to include in your Word doc, you just click "Publish" and Captivate makes your Word doc. You'll have to apply a few edits to it, because Captivate seems to have only included this option as an afterthought. The tool is really meant to create online material, and printed material is treated as an added bonus; I guess they're called "handouts" because there's an expectation that these will be supplemental materials for the *real* trainings, presumably the simulations. But --I know I'm kind of old and everything, but really-- sometimes, a Word doc is the best tool for the training need.
Software Demo Tools: Ancile uPerform vs. Adobe Captivate
At my current instructional design position, I'm using Adobe Captivate, and a weird one called Ancile uPerform. It's "weird" because it's not very common. I'd never heard of it prior to my current job. If you don't have access to Ancile's online "intelligence hub," it's difficult to find much detailed troubleshooting information about it, or at least – compared to Captivate.
Even with Captivate, though, if you want to know something really specific, it can be hard to find that information unless you can come up with the optimal google search terms. This can be a challenge if you don't even know what the action is called.
I have been familiar with Captivate for several years now, but making these kinds of tutorials is pretty new to me. With most authoring tools, especially Adobe tools, I've observed that someone can say that they "know" any one of them, but for most people this means that they know how to do...whatever they need to know how to do to perform their jobs, and probably not a whole lot more than that.
For example, I have a limited knowledge of Illustrator, even though it's the first tool I ever learned how to use in Adobe Creative suite. I've only used it professionally one time, for one very short project, and that was about eight years ago. My knowledge of InDesign is much more broad, but even still it's confined to things that I needed to do for my job, or for school. Incidentally, I learned InDesign in Graphic Design school in 1999, which was the year it came out. That could make me sound like an expert, until I explain that there have been years-long gaps between projects where I actually used it.
I sure do wish that every project manager and person-who-hires-contractors understood that most people who "know" a particular tool really only "know" how to do whatever-they-have-done-before in that tool, and even then they only "know" it if they've done it pretty recently. I always do try to disclose this interviews, yet sometimes it still seems to escape the realization of folks I've worked for when I tell them I need to get my proverbial sea legs back before I should be totally set loose with no supervision on a particular tool. Cuz, y'know,...Use it or lose it.
Captivate is possibly the most exemplary tool to demonstrate this principle. For a while I was conflicted about even putting it on my resume for this very reason, although I do feel reasonably confident about it since my last two projects – though admittedly I'm not confident about everything in Captivate, because I'd say there are three things I know how to do really well, one thing I can do pretty well, and then a whole lot of things I've never even attempted, or probably don't even know about yet.
I am confident about including uPerform on my resume, however, because uPerform only has a handful of potential outputs. Captivate can do all kinds of fancy things, but uPerform's capabilities are more specialized. (Which, I guess, is just a nice way of saying "limited.")
Despite being virtually unheard of, uPerform is not a bad tool at all. It's much easier to use than Captivate, though the overall capabilities are much more...yes, we'll go with "specialized." Ultimately though it's probably a better option for non-Instructional Designers who want to make a whole lot of software simulations/walkthroughs in a short amount of time, because it's so much more user-friendly.
Captivate is a better tool for more elaborate courses, and for auto-playback simulations that can do cool things. It's got a lot of bells and whistles, which is exactly why it's so difficult to become proficient in using it.
Both of these tools can make Word document tutorials from software simulations. Both make Word outputs that are aesthetically really ugly (though Captivate is more customizable, you don't have a ton of options for design), and both have a variety of pros and cons.
Before I understood how to use Captivate and its ilk for this purpose, I made quick-n-dirty job aids for co-workers in a very slow and clunky way. This was to use Snagit, PrintScreen, or my Windows Snipping Tool to take a bunch of screenshots of the process I wanted to document, save each screenshot as a .jpg or .png, and then manually paste the screenshots into a Word doc. After painstakingly organizing and formatting the screenshots in my doc, I added highlight boxes or callouts, along with text to explain the process.
Predictably, this took a lot of time. I mean, it's fine for a three-step process, but for a 30-step process...not so much.
For the record, a good Instructional Designer knows that a tutorial probably shouldn't have more than say, 25 steps. But also for the record, in the Real World, Instructional Designers frequently have to create simulations, walkthroughs, tutorials, job-aids, etc., that are like 80+ steps, because that's the drinking-from-the-firehose-at-all-times world we live in, sorry. Yes, I concur that superlong tutorials are horrible, but go tell it to every project manager I've ever had.
Individually screenshotting 80+ screens, formatting all in Word and then writing out the instruction manually...is s-l-o-w. I have certainly done it before, and when I was a tech writer I put together documents with actual photos that had to be shot, uploaded from the camera, sifted through, selected, and then edited in Photoshop, all before I could even begin the fun of fighting with them in Word. To my knowledge, that can't yet be avoided with actual photographs. But I would rather not have to do that with screenshots, if there's a better way.
Hey guess what: there IS a better way!
With a tool like Captivate or uPerform, you can forget about making manual screenshots. You just open your tool, fire up the software you want to document, and click a "record" button on a little widget. It's not a video recorder however; if you're thinking of something like Camtasia, that's not what we're talking about here. In fact, a software simulation recorder doesn't start doing anything until you perform some action with either your mouse or your keyboard. Rather than a recording device, it's an automatic screenshot-capturing device.
As you go through the step-by-step process in your software, the tool automatically takes a screenshot every time you make a mouse or keyboard action, along with automatic highlight boxes and callouts. To create the callouts, the tool makes its best guess of what action you performed, (click, scroll, press return, etc.) and generates caption text accordingly. When you are finished recording, you click the "stop" button on your recording widget, and the tool opens an editing module where you will find a chronological library of your screenshots and the accompanying text.
Of course, you have to edit the crap out of everything, because the tool's "best guess" of what action you performed in your demo is sometimes really weird and wrong. The text may be awkwardly worded at best, and the callouts are sometimes nowhere near the correct place on the screen image. You will inevitably have to delete a lot of slides, since even the most seasoned user of any software is going to throw in a few false moves here and there. If you make even one wrong move in your software, the "incorrect" slides that will need to be deleted can add up fast as you fumble around. But still, these tools perform a huge chunk of the work for you. The editing will take you some time, but making a software sim is far superior to capturing individual screenshots with Snagit.
These kinds of projects can be published in a few different ways. A software simulation is usually an .html or .swf file, which can be published on the web as a rudimentary little "video" of the action happening – the mouse pointer floats around the page and shows you where to click in the software, or what to type in which editable field. You have the option to publish your project to play automatically, or the sim can be made interactive so that the user must physically click each highlight box in order to advance to the next slide or activity.
You can also publish the simulation as a Word doc. These are useful if you want to have paper handouts in a live training, or to store as pdf's on an LMS as part of a training reference library. When published as a Word doc, the tool automatically saves each screenshot as an image in the Word doc, and generates all the associated caption text.
Each of the tools I've been using has different idiosyncrasies as to how these Word docs ultimately look, and both have some similarities, for better or for worse.
Both tools are pretty limited in your capacity to edit the images. The callouts and highlight boxes are not saved as individual objects that you can manipulate – they are static on the image. If you want to edit them, they must be edited in the project itself rather than in the Word doc. Captivate can be set to omit some of the objects before you publish it. I'm not sure about uPerform.
Both Ancile uPerform and Adobe Captivate also publish the Word doc with the instructional text BELOW the screenshot image, which bugs me. I feel like the reader's instinct is to expect the text to be ABOVE the image, but maybe that's just me (well, me and some of my co-workers who are also pretty bugged by this). The Word doc is editable, so you can move your captions around if you want, but I haven't figured out a way to force the source files to publish it any other way. It should be noted, though, that I still have a lot to learn about templates, so this isn't to say that a method doesn't exist.
Captivate's software simulations look better than uPerform's and have a lot more capabilities, but uPerform makes slightly nicer-looking Word docs than Captivate. I think it's because uPerform is designed somewhat more for this purpose than Captivate. I like that uPeform automatically generates a number on the text of each step with a corresponding number on an arrow pointing to the location where the mouse or keyboard action takes place. Granted, these arrows are TINY, and it's not always perfectly clear what they are pointing to, but I still like that it does this automatically. Conversely, the only arrows you can use in Captivate are huge and ugly, and must be manually placed.
Captivate generates a step number above the slide, rather than alongside the text. Note in the image below, in my template or in some other setting, Captivate is set up to generate the step number twice, and I am not sure why. Additionally, for some reason the slide images in all of my Captivate Word docs have been "squished," with the text centered but the image justified to the left. This could also be a template issue, which I don't yet know how to fix; template stuff is currently a little above my pay grade (though hopefully not for long).
Also, Captivate publishes the caption text on the screenshot image, along with identical "step" text below the image. This is redundant and annoying, but the caption text cannot be deleted from the screenshot once the project is published, it's now a static part of the actual image.
UPDATE: you can eliminate that redundancy if you just uncheck a box when you publish the sim as a Word doc. More on that later.
The caption text in the doc will keep the same formatting you applied to it when you formatted your simulation. In this case, I had formatted the caption text to be centered, so it is aligned to the center in the doc as well. Until I figure out whether this can be fixed in the template or publish settings, if I want to fix that, I have to manually edit it in my Word doc.
So, yes, there are ways to adjust some of these settings before you publish your Captivate project as a Word doc to eliminate or change this stuff, but I haven't figured out every possibility yet. It's not for lack of trying/googling. People who say that Captivate has a steep learning curve are not kidding around.
uPerform automatically generates tables that show you examples of what to type in which field, which is nice when you are making a demo of software that requires a lot of information to be typed into a lot of fields. The below example shows a simple table with just one "typing" step, but these tables can have multiple cells in them to accommodate for filling in multiple fields on the same page.
These tables can be easily edited in the Word doc, though they are a pain to edit in the actual simulation. I'll spare you the details other than to say that it takes about four clicks to find the dialog box where you can edit this text, and the process is not even slightly intuitive.
The same goes for some of the other weird settings in uPerform, but just as with Captivate, some of that stuff can be changed in the template. Changing the template in uPerform is no less challenging than it is in Captivate, however.
One of my pet-peeves about uPerform is that you can't "hide" slides, so if you want to get rid of stuff, you have no choice but to delete it. It makes me nervous to do this in case I change my mind about a step later, so I like that Captivate gives you the option to just turn the slide off and virtually "set it aside" in case you want to use it later.
Meanwhile, one of my pet-peeves about Captivate is that it doesn't have a feature that lets you insert more recorded steps into a simulation by virtue of one easy command, as does uPerform. In Captivate, you have to create a whole new sim and then copy-paste the steps over from one doc to another.
So, both tools have stuff about them that is cool, and both tools have stuff about them that is dumb.
Publishing Sims as Word Docs
It's easy to publish a uPerform simulation as a Word doc. You just go to "File > Publish," and then a dialog box with a bunch of options and settings pops up. You make sure to select "Work Instruction" and then select "word" under that header, and it will publish your Word doc in a separate folder on your hard drive. (You can also publish it to uPerform's server, but that's a whole 'nother facet of uPerform that I'm not going to get into).
Publishing a Captivate simulation as a Word doc is a little more of an opaque process. Instead of anything that looks like "Publish," you first have to go to "Print." This is completely non-intuitive, just like a lot of other things about Captivate, because in many cases I don't actually want to "Print" anything, I just want to save my project as a Word doc. Sometimes it seems like Captivate was deliberately designed to be mysterious so that non-Instructional Designers won't even try to use it, but I mean I guess it's job security for me, so...? Okay?
At any rate, you're going to go to "File > Print" from the dialog box, then under the "Type" drop-down menu you will choose "Handouts."
 |
| NOTE that "Caption Text" is unchecked -- this is how you can eliminate the redundancy of the caption text appearing in the boxes onscreen *and* below the image in the Word doc, as I mentioned above. |
From this dialog you also can select a bunch of different options for your project, though I find these kind of limited, because "Include Objects and Questions" is pretty broad and I wish I could fine-tune it a little bit. Oh wells. There are so many things I wish Captivate would do that it doesn't do, I could practically keep a running list. (Oh look, I'm hardly the only one who has these complaints, though maybe this guy is a bit harsh).
So, once you've worked through your frustrations at Captivate's shortcomings and decided what to include in your Word doc, you just click "Publish" and Captivate makes your Word doc. You'll have to apply a few edits to it, because Captivate seems to have only included this option as an afterthought. The tool is really meant to create online material, and printed material is treated as an added bonus; I guess they're called "handouts" because there's an expectation that these will be supplemental materials for the *real* trainings, presumably the simulations. But --I know I'm kind of old and everything, but really-- sometimes, a Word doc is the best tool for the training need.
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