How to Add a Rollover to an Adobe Captivate Animation

You can create online demonstrations, simulations and tutorials using Adobe Captivate. Captivate is software that capture screens, windows and cursor movements and turns them into Adobe Flash movies. Rollover boxes can be used in different ways. For example, you may create an animation of a software application to teach users about the areas or menu items of the main screen. By adding rollover boxes to the animation, a text caption displays whenever the user moves her cursor over the item in the animation. You might also use this feature for a static demonstration of a software product at a trade show. As a user walks by, he can roll the cursor over different parts of the screen, which will display the text you associated with each item. The following explains how to add a rollover box to a previously captured Adobe Captivate animation.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• PC or Mac
• Adobe Captivate

1. Open an Adobe Captivate animation to which you want to add the rollover box. The animation opens in the Captivate editor.

2. Choose the "Edit" tab of the Captivate editor. Thumbnails of all the captured screens appear in the left column. Assume that you want to add a rollover box that displays the entire time a particular screen displays.

3. From the thumbnails, select the screen in the animation where you want the rollover boxes to display.

4. Click "Insert" on the menu bar and select "Rollover Caption." The "New rollover caption" dialog box displays.

5. Enter the text of the caption in the dialog box. From this dialog box you can also choose how the rollover caption will display (i.e., the captions color, style, font, size and color).

6. Click the "OK" button when done. The rollover box and the caption will be displayed. The rollover area is displayed as a dotted box.

7. To make sure the rollover box and caption display the entire time the screen is visible to the user, double-click in the center of the dotted rollover box. The "Rollover Area" dialog box displays. Here you can change the color, width and transparency of the rollover area. You can even make the rollover box invisible by changing the color of the box.

8. Click the "Options" tab. Under "Timing" click the "Display For" drop-down menu. You can display the rollover box for a specific amount of time, for the entire time the slide is shown or for the entire movie.

9. Once you have selected the option that best fits your needs, click the "OK" button.

10. Save the file. To see how the caption appears in the animation, click the "Preview" button on the main menu.