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Creating a clean professional presentation will make a world of difference when
you show it to others. If the elements on your slides are aligned and evenly
spaced, then your presentation will have more impact because sloppiness is
distracting, and it really drags the user's attention away from the content
that you are trying to deliver. Fortunately, Captivate has a variety of tools
that you can use to create a nice tight, aligned presentation or slides within
a presentation, and that's what we are going to take a look at in this lesson.
The slide that we are driving towards here is actually what we have on Slide 2.
We'll double-click on that and you can see that we have got some objects, these
are all Text Captions, this object has a specific distance from the side and
top, these objects are all aligned and evenly spaced, and the text in this
green object sits at the top of the Text Caption. To recreate that, we'll go over to Slide 1,
and we'll start working with the content that's already there. Let's start
with the top caption. Whenever you select an object in Captivate, if you look
at the top here, you will see that you have the ability to precisely locate that
object on the slide. In this case, I want all of my objects that are at
the top of the slide to be 20 pixels from the left-hand side.
So I'll drag and select 50, replace it with 20, and then this caption is now
precisely 20 pixels from the left-hand side of the slide, and I can do the same
with the top. I want it to be, maybe 10 pixels down, there. By knowing that,
anytime I create a slide and I have an object that's at the top of the slide,
whether it's a text caption or anything else, I can know how to position that
object so that it's going to give my entire presentation a nice tight, look and feel.
And let's draw our attention to this caption here. In this caption, I have an
alignment issue with the type in the caption. If I double-click on this phrase
here, it's sitting in the middle of the caption and really the effect that I
want is for this to be a sort of a header. So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to reset the Vertical alignment for the text in the caption.
By double-clicking on it, I have gone into Caption Editing mode, and all I need
to do is come up here to the Align Text Top button. Click that, and now the
text in that caption is aligned vertically. The final thing that I need to do
is to work on these captions here. This caption is actually sitting underneath
the green caption that I wanted to sit on top of, and that's an order issue that
I can adjust very quickly. I'm going to right-click on it and choose
Order and I want to bring it to the front. If there were several items and I just
wanted to adjust the stacking order, I could do that by selecting Bring
Forward, Send Backwards, or whatever, but in this case I'm going to bring it all
the way to the front and there we go. Now I'm going to eyeball this. I'm just kind
of bring it into place because the first step that I need to take is to actually
duplicate this item, and very much like duplicating slides, to duplicate
an object, I can right-click on it and choose Duplicate, or I can use good old
Ctrl+D, hold the Ctrl key down, type a D, type another D, and there I have
got three of these things. To make them so that they lineup correctly
though, I'm going to eyeball them, and my problem here is that they are just
not aligned. In fact, they are not even distributed correctly and I could have
spent a lot of time trying to line them up, but that's not going to be very useful.
Instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the bottom one, I'm
going to Shift+Select the next one and then the third one, and I selected in
that order because I wanted to show you that the order in which you select your
objects matters. I selected the first one its handles are light.
The next ones have darker handles, which indicates that when I apply
an alignment to these objects. The objects will align to that first object.
So for example, if I wanted to align these to the right, they would all line up
to the right-hand side of this object. So to provide my alignment, I'm going to use
the Alignment toolbar and again, the Alignment toolbar like any other, if it's
not visible, you can always get it by selecting Window > Toolbars, in this
case, Alignment. It is visible, so I'm just going to go ahead and use it but
I'm going to adjust it because I like it to be right over here, right underneath
my slide. I use Alignment all the time in Captivate and so I like to have it
nice and handy. As I said, I'm going to align these. I'm actually
just going to align these Center. So all I need to do is click on the
Align Center button and ***! They are all centered. In fact, if I wanted to
align these to the green object, and center everything, I'm just going to hold
the Shift key down and click on the green caption and align everything on Center,
and now everything is aligned nicely, however they are not distributed correctly.
There is a different amount of space among the three different objects.
To fix that, I'm going to use Distribute. I'll Shift+Select my objects. Instead of
using the Alignment Options that Captivate has to offer, I'm going to use
Distribute, in this case, Distribute Vertically. And by clicking that, what
Captivate has done is it has inserted the same amount of space among all of
these objects and now everything is aligned and distributed nicely.
The final step is for me just to drag and select over the entire set and I
can move everything around at once, once I have it aligned so that I can place
it precisely where I want it to be. And if your goal is to create a nice
professional tight looking presentation then the Alignment and Distribution
features in Captivate are going to be tools that you are going to use frequently.