We all understand that Captivate 12 is "built around a template-based authoring approach, designed to streamline project creation with minimal effort." that's just great. And we all want a simple user interface for our content creators who are less technically savvy, which Captivate provides. That does not mean that the content administrators don't still need the ability to have custom templates with variables to integrate properly with their LMS (and in our case LRS). We have government mandated variable time requirements for slide dwell time and total lesson duration. We also have varying pass percentage requirements.

There are a large number of exchanges that have to happen to make sure that a given user / registration is launched with the appropriate injected values. That means that the variable must be accurate. Those variable should not have to be recreated ever, they should be selectable, custom variables that are options for any new project if they are in the options folder.

Currently, you have to copy a slide from a 'template project' somewhere on your computer. When you do that, with no apparent specific reason, Captivate creates a new variable. This, of course, breaks the logic and you must go through every slide with variables and make sure that a numerical suffix has not been added when pasting. There is no way to turn this off. Further, you cannot delete these ghost variables that end up being sometimes 50-100 randomly generated variables. You try to delete them, and even though those variables are used NOWHERE in the project, Captivate does not allow you to delete them. It is genuinely frustrating.

The entire variable and design option architecture is pretty broken. It is 'clunky' at best. I dont even want to think about how many hours I have had to waste fixing logic errors in a program that is supposed to be "designed to streamline project creation with minimal effort."

In our case, it has been anything but 'streamlined'

Our dev team is throttled by the Captivate teams decision making process, it is not good.

We want the simple interface and template, yes.

We MUST have the ability to create our own custom templates complete with custom variables that do not create a 1000 ghosts.