Creating content with Captivate is a three-step process, or to be exact, a four-step process. However, only three of the four steps take place in Captivate. That's why we like to refer to the first step as step zero!

This is the only step of the process that does not involve working with the Captivate application. Depending on the project you are planning, it can last from a few minutes to a few months. This step is probably the most important step of the entire process as it is where you actually create the scenarios and the storyboards. This is where you develop the pedagogical approach that will drive the entire project. What will you teach the students? In what order will you introduce the topics? How and when will you assess the students' knowledge? These are some of the very important questions you should answer before opening Captivate for the first time. Step zero is where the teacher's skills fully express themselves.

At the most basic level, a typical Captivate project is a collection of slides, just like a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. So your first task when creating a new Captivate file is probably to create a bunch of slides to work with. There are several ways to do this:

• First, Captivate has the ability to record any action you perform onscreen. You typically use this ability to create software-related interactive training or simulations. You use your mouse to perform actions on your computer, and behind the scenes, Captivate watches and records any action you do using a sophisticated screen capture engine based on screenshots. Each of these screenshots becomes a slide in your new Captivate project. Using the screen capture feature of Captivate is covered in Chapter 8, Capturing Onscreen Action.
• Very often, though, the Captivate project you are working on has nothing to do with software-related skills. In this case, you don't need to use screen capture to take screenshots. You create the slides entirely within Captivate. This is the preferred approach for new training materials that don't require the screen capture capabilities.
• A third solution is to import the slides from Microsoft PowerPoint. You typically use this solution to convert existing training material made with PowerPoint into interactive online training modules, but it is not considered best practice for new training material. Importing PowerPoint slides into Captivate is covered in Chapter 11, Using Captivate with Other Applications.

This step is the most time-consuming phase of the entire process. This is where your project slowly takes shape to become an actual interactive course module.

In this step, you arrange the final sequence of actions, record narrations, add objects to the slides (such as Text Captions and Buttons), arrange those objects in the Timeline, add title and ending slides, develop the advanced interactions, create the Question Slides of the quiz, configure the quiz reporting options, and so on. At the end of this step, the project should be ready for publication. Sometimes, it can take several rounds of edits until you have a project that is ready to publish.

Note that, for most projects, step one and step two overlap. Unless you use screen capture, there is no clear distinction between step one and step two. It is ok to go back and forth between those two steps when developing your next Captivate project.

Step three is where you make your project available to your learners. Captivate allows you to publish your course modules in a wide variety of formats. The two formats that you will use most of the time are the Flash and the HTML5 formats.

• Flash is the historical publishing format of Captivate. It is still widely used today. Publishing the project in Flash makes the deployment of your eLearning courses very easy; only the Flash Player plugin is needed. The very same Flash Player that is used to read Flash-enabled websites or YouTube videos is all you need to play back your published Captivate projects. The major caveat of this publishing format is that it is not supported on mobile devices.
• Captivate can also publish your projects in HTML5, which makes the project available on any device, including desktops and laptops, as well as tablets and smartphones. In today's technological landscape, HTML5 has become the preferred format for publishing your online courses for computers and mobile devices.

Note that some features of Captivate are only available either in Flash or in HTML5. For example, a Responsive Project can only be published in HTML5, while a Text Animation object can only be published in Flash. It is very important to know the publishing format you will use before starting the development of a new project.

Captivate can also publish the project as a standalone application (.exe on Windows and .app on Macintosh) or as video files that can be easily uploaded to YouTube and viewed on a tablet or smartphone.

Step three will be covered in great detail in Chapter 14, Finishing Touches and Publishing.