Articulate General Observation

Aug 01, 2012

I've been using Articulate Presenter for about  8 months and I must say initially I was really impressed. When it works, it's great! But I'm finding that each time I use it instead of getting more familiar with it and doing more with it, I'm finding it is so quirky and glitchy that I'm finding myself not wanting to use it. Some things you'd expect it to be able to do it doesn't (i.e. I want to delete the Retry Quiz button on the Pass Results screen only - but it must be eliminated from both the Pass & Fail slide) or the spacing on the answer options in the quizzes changing to something other than what I set it to and it changes to something different each time you view it, and  just now, after spending days getting my animations synced just right to my narration, it arbitrarily deleted all my audio on each slide! How can this happen! When I want to delete audio I must go into each slide in the editor to delete it, but something happened to make all the audio delete at once! This takes a lot of time and when you're on a tight production schedule, you can't afford these unexpected problems. I'm so FRUSTRATED!

5 Replies
Bruce Graham

Tanya,

Presenter is now 3+ years old, and will be getting a serious overhaul in the very near future.

The arbitrary audio deletion functionality that many of us, myself included have been hit by in the past.

Sorry that you are feeling so frustrated, however, all I can offer is they have listened, and product stability seems to be a lot better, certainly if Storyline is anything to go by.

Bruce

Tanya Samuels

Thanks for your comments Bruce! The last one was particularly helpful as it reminded me that I did have a backup from last night and it did have all the audio! It was easier for me to copy what I'd done so far today to the old file with audio, than re-add and sync all the audio again! There is a God!! Thanks again Bruce!

Melanie Sobie

Tanya,

I felt the same way you did at one time.  It is a shame we have to stumble our way though and run into quirks that we don't know about and learn from our frustration. I think every new install of Presenter Studio should come with an email welcome from the company and a note that you first must know that you must create, edit and publish your PowerPoint and Presenter files on your local hard drive.  Once I learned about that and started new projects on my hard drive I never had a problem again with losing audio. But boy, those first few courses I developed were a nightmare since I created the projects initially in the group network folders and then later moved them to my hard drive. It just doesn't make sense that you can't work with electronic files on a network folder as is expected in large corporations or government entities. If we knew about this quirk up front it would save a lot of time and frustration.

http://www.articulate.com/support/kb_article.php?product=ap9&id=x3fdibopjwig

Also, if I would have been alerted right up front to become familar with the non-supported PowerPoint animations that would have saved a lot of time and frustration. Now that I know what I can and cannot use I have no problems.

On the other hand, I have to add that I just love my Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker and Engage. It enables me to do a lot of cool stuff without having to know flash programing or have other advanced computer skills. It is a nice extension to my PowerPoint ninja cape that I wear. LOL!

Melanie

Tanya Samuels

LOL! I wish I could say I love it, but right now I'm not feeling it. Yes, you can do cool things (which is what attracted me in the first place), but always with some unwanted surprise waiting around the corner. I was on my local hard drive when the audio disappeared! Luckily Bruce reminded me that I had a backup - which was on the network and that saved me this time!

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