Captivate Is Captivating!
April 04, 2017
Captivate Is Captivating!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate
Adobe Captivate is in use across the whole organization, with different Learning & Development areas using it in different ways, in terms of types of instruction. On my team, and the other Learning & Development teams in the U.S. (which used to be part of my team prior to L&D being decentralized), Captivate has generally been used to create systems training. However, in at least one Learning & Development team in Canadian operations, I believe they also use it to develop more conceptual types of training as well. In addition, last year SLF U.S. acquired part of another company and inherited their Captivate training modules, which were also more conceptual in nature (product training). Personally, though, I think its greatest strength is its ability to create interactive systems training, which I think it does better than any other product that's available for a similar cost. For more conceptual training, I prefer to use other tools, although I do think that Captivate is very capable of doing a good job with that, as well, from conceptual courses I've seen that were created with Captivate.
- The ability to quickly and easily create systems demos with text captions automatically added in.
- The three-mode approach you can use -- you can record one system simulation and then use it to create a non-interactive demo, a guided user-interactive demo, and/or a non-guided user assessment.
- The ability to set which area of the screen you want to capture, rather than necessarily being forced to capture your entire screen.
- The ability to use actions and variables (although, admittedly, I haven't really delved into this in Captivate myself...)
- The ease of publishing output to an Adobe Connect server.
- It drives me crazy that the caption text doesn't automatically put a period at the end...I always have to end up going into each and every one to add that darned period!
- The caption boxes aren't as slick looking as they should be nowadays, and the ability to customize them isn't quite as robust as I'd like.
- Getting live tech support is exceedingly expensive and Adobe has the worst, most frustrating website (which is ironic, considering the products that they sell). Adobe has many very good products, but they're not a company I enjoy doing business with.
- I believe that it's had a generally positive effect, but that's mostly based on anecdotal info, "Level 1" evaluation, and some non-quantitative "Level 3" information from supervisors/managers, as we don't generally do "Level 4" or "Level 5" measurement of our e-courses.
Captivate is more full-featured than Snagit (which is the most limited), Adobe Presenter Video Express (which is probably the next most limited), or Camtasia (which is probably the most direct competitor that I'm at all familiar with). While I have a limited familiarity with Camtasia (and actually do have access to it because it was bundled into another e-learning authoring tool that I have, Lectora), everything I've seen and read seem to indicate that it's more limited than Captivate.
As to why I selected Captivate....my company is basically an Adobe "shop" -- unless there's something that an Adobe product can't do (or can't do well enough), we're heavily discouraged (or, in some cases, simply not allowed) to purchase a competing product.