Using the New Timeline in Captivate

The Timeline Features

Let's take a look at the Timeline and explore its various features (see Figure 1):

1. Start Captivate.
2. Open a file or create one.
3. Click the Edit tab (to the right of the Storyboard tab).
4. If the Timeline panel is collapsed, click the arrow to expand it.

Figure 1. The Timeline in Captivate

Columns and Rows

The Timeline's columns show the elapsed number of seconds. Figure 1 shows a slide that lasts a little over four seconds in a Captivate demo. The rows represent different objects or actions. In Figure 1 you can see at once the following information on the five rows:

• Row 1: Mouse cursor starts moving 0.9 seconds after the slide starts and ends after 3.3 seconds at the end of this slide
• Row 2: Caption shows the message "Select the Tools menu"
• Row 3: Tools menu is highlighted
• Row 4: Duration of the entire slide appears as 4.2 seconds
• Row 5: Audio track appears

The bottom row is always the Slide object—unless there is an audio track, in which case it appears on the last row. You can move the objects and actions on the rows around, but you cannot move the Slide and audio tracks. For instance, you can grab the Mouse action and drag it so that it appears below the Caption object (the "Select the Tools..." caption).

You can drag an object left or right on its row to change the time position where it begins and ends. For instance, if you drag the Mouse object all the way to the left in Figure 1, the mouse pointer movement begins immediately when the slide starts, rather than after 0.9 seconds.

When you click any object on a row, you will see that the entire row becomes selected. Its color changes and the cell designations disappear, as you can see in the audio track in Figure 1. You can select more than one row by pressing the Control key to select one row or object at a time or pressing Shift to choose a range of rows or objects. Each time you select an object on the Timeline, its associated window object is selected as well.

You can also select an object on the Stage. When you do, the same object in the Timeline will be selected. If you select more than one object on the Stage, each object selected will be highlighted on the Timeline.

Once you've selected more than one row, clicking an object from any of the selected rows allows you to drag the objects on all the selected rows at the same time. This is very useful when you have a set of synchronized actions and objects and want to group them temporarily to change the start time for all objects simultaneously. The objects retain their relative positions to each other when you do so.

Timeline Buttons

At the bottom of the Timeline panel, there are three buttons: Stop, Play/Pause, and Sound/Mute. They perform the following actions:

• Stop resets the playhead to the beginning of the slide and stops playback.
• Play/Pause toggles playback on and off. Clicking it stops the playhead. Clicking it again resumes playback from the point at which you paused it. The keyboard equivalent of this is F3 or the Spacebar.
• Sound/Mute toggles the sound on and off.

You will also find a Preview button on the main toolbar. Clicking this button gives you several options, including the following two choices:

• Play This Slide, the equivalent of pressing the Spacebar or F3, plays only the contents of the current slide. When you do this, any interactive elements, such as buttons and text-entry boxes, will be nonfunctional. Think of this as a quick preview option.
• Movie creates a preview of the entire movie—including any interactive elements, which appear as they will in the final, published version.

Timeline Tooltips

Most elements on the Timeline display useful tooltips when you pause your pointer on them. Tooltips for objects show especially useful information (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Mouse tooltip (left) and caption tooltip (right)

In each case, you can see the start time, when the object is introduced in the slide, and how long the object remains onscreen.

Expanding and Collapsing the Timeline

At the bottom center of the Timeline, clicking an arrow button collapses and expands the Timeline to give the window below more room. The white up-arrow changes into a down-arrow and appears near the top of the screen. Clicking the down-arrow button expands the Timeline again (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Collapse button (left) and expand button (right)

To customize the amount of real estate the Timeline uses on the screen, drag the panel's bottom border, which appears on either side of the expand/collapse arrows in Figure 3.

You can also collapse and expand the Timeline by clicking the arrow in the Timeline title bar—for example, the arrow next to the title, "Timeline for Slide 1" in Figure 1.

Changing the Scale of the Timeline

There is an option (a magnifying glass icon) in the upper-right corner of the Timeline for changing the settings in the Timeline (see Figure 4). When you click the magnifying glass, you have the option of changing the scale on the Timeline that denotes seconds. You can also choose the Short option to reduce the height of each row.

Figure 4. View settings (see upper-right corner)

Timeline Object Icons

Each object has a little icon that shows its type. For instance, the Image object in Figure 5 looks like a little piece of paper with a paintbrush. If you attach audio to an object from its properties dialog box, an additional icon indicates that the object contains audio.

Figure 5. Image icon (left) and image icon with audio (right)

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