If you have used Macromedia Captivate to create interactive software training simulations, you have probably come across a situation where you needed to simulate a right-click event. Unfortunately, the current version of Captivate cannot directly support this functionality because Macromedia Flash Player uses the right-click event to trigger the player menu, which enables you to change player settings or zoom in and out of the SWF file that is playing. This restriction can be frustrating if your demonstration or simulation needs to show that your software has functions only available by performing a right-click action.

Have you ever worked on an e-learning project, only to find that you need to alter some of the screen action you have captured? In projects I have completed recently, I found myself in this exact situation. Had I not discovered Macromedia Captivate, I would have had no choice but to either re-record a number of screens or the entire demonstration or simulation again ­ both of which would have been an extremely time-consuming affair.

As an educator with a post-secondary institution I have had something of a ringside seat watching the evolution of e-Learning. My biggest complaint was that, in general, most institutions getting into the game just 'didn't get it.' Their approach to the process was to create what I called 'digital in-baskets' where the student completed the work and sent it in as an e-mail attachment. How they could regard this process as 'distance learning' or the 'digital classroom' was a mystery to me. One institution proudly walked me through their 'digital in-basket' and was quite upset when I suggested they could save themselves some serious infrastructure dollars by replacing the program with something more efficient: envelopes and stamps.

With Macromedia Captivate, you can create interactive tutorials with recorded narration, built-in testing, with an easy, painless, and quick process. But now that authors can so easily create tutorials, they have time to think about the best way to deliver their content to end users, and to think about what works well with the Captivate workflow.

In part one of our article, we created a very basic Captivate movie. Now we'll enhance our project with some audio elements - narration, sound effects, and music.