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Tutorial: Hide the total duration in the TOC

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By on Blog, Captivate, Tutorial

I thought I would continue with a couple of more tips & trics for manipulating the standard TOC in Adobe Captivate 4. I spent a day breaking open a Captivate file and peered into the mechanics of how everything works so I still have a couple of new things up my sleeve ;o)

Unfortunately these TOC manipulations are exclusive to AS2 projects. If you publish your Adobe Captivate project as AS3 then there seems to be no way of manipulating the TOC.

One thing that has always annoyed me is the TOC duration timer in the bottom of the TOC. The TOC settings allow you to deselect “Duration” so that each of your slides in the TOC won’t display the minutes / seconds it takes to complete that slide. One would think that if a developer disables the duration view for the individual slides then the total duration would also be disable but unfortunately not.

[swfobj src=”https://www.cpguru.com/wp-content/hideTocDuration.swf” width=”480″ height=”337″ align=”center” allowfullscreen=”false”]

There is however a very simple approach to disable this TOC total duration display. Again we will need a custom Flash file to do the trick.

The code is just two lines (three with the stop command) and it looks like this:

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this.stop();

_root.TOCContainer_mc.TOCBox_mc.TOCFooter_mc.TOCFooter_Text._visible = false;
_root.TOCContainer_mc.TOCBox_mc.TOCFooter_mc.timeBack_mc._visible = false;

Basically what we are doing is setting the movieclips inside Adobe Captivate 4 that holds the duration as invisible.

Of course you can make them visible again by changing the property from “false” to “true”.

I included a zip file here with the Flash file and the published SWF in case someone without access to Flash would like to use this feature. Ignore the _root warning when you insert the animation into Adobe Captivate.

Download the files here: Hide TOC Duration component / widget (1038 downloads)

Have fun ;o)

/Michael

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12 Comments

  1. Will Campbell on

    Exactly where do I put the custom swf? I put it in the first frame of my presentation and it did not work.

  2. Will Campbell on

    Okay… I see you have to publish in AS2. Is there any way to do this in AS3? Thanks!

  5. Chris on

    Can you provide the step-by-step process for adding this custom swf? I am not sure where to place it either.

  6. Michael on

    @ Chris – The entire code is shown in the tutorial so simply add it to your custom SWF. Keep in mind that this is AS2 and will only work in Captivate 4 though.

    /Michael

  8. Justin on

    You say: “I included a zip file here with the Flash file and the published SWF in case someone without access to Flash would like to use this feature. ”

    That’s me.

    I downloaded the file and im not sure what to do with these things… do I upload it into the widgets folder? I tried that but nothing showed up.

    I am lost, what do I do with these two files???

  9. Michael on

    @Justin,

    You will need to insert the swf file as a Widget in your project. That is basically all that you need to do. If you like you can copy it to the Widgets folder where you installed Captivate 4, but it’s not nessecary.

    /Michael

  10. Justin on

    Michael,

    went to Insert > Widget (Captivate 4, project is AS2)

    I had the SWF file on my desktop so I selected it and clicked “OPEN”. Received error that said “Not a Valid Widget”…

    Thoughts here?

    • Michael on

      Aaah sorry my bad.. This is not a widget actually. It’s just a Flash Animation. Insert the SWF as an animation on your first slide and that should work.

      /Michael