Making best use of master slides to speed up publishing/viewing

Hi Simon,

In short, you should always use master slides to handle slides that have common elements.  So, whether that means each of those slides have a common background, animation, or other grouped objects, you'll find that your presentation publishes quicker by using master slides.

From the technical side, just imagine you have 10 slides with a common background image and a picture on the right side of the slide.  If you publish that presentation, that means that Articulate has to publish the background image and the picture.  That's 20 separate objects in total.  However, if you take those same 2 elements and put them into master slides, Articulate will only publish those once.  So, that's 18 objects that we don't have to publish.  

Does that make sense?

Hi Brian

I agree entirely with what you're saying there, but my question is more about how AP publishes (and indeed displays) each slide to the learner.  I totally get using master slides for cutting out repeat content and can see how this speeds up publishing.  But when it comes to displaying it, will AP load a slide more quickly if a bulk of the content is in the master slide?

As mentioned in the OP, this is connected with my flickering issue.  I'm already using master slides throughout, but will willingly throw more of my content into them if I "know" that AP will load each slide more quickly.  I'm not talking about slides with mainly limited text and a small image - I'm talking lots of detail with 20-30 objects (mix of background image, 5-10 other images and then text boxes/shapes) per slide.

Thanks

EDIT: sometimes when I'm talking about master slides I mean slide layouts - just for the record

Hi Simon,

If you haven't already, please submit a support case to us regarding the flickering issue:

http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/

In regards to the master slides, yes, loading will be quicker especially if you have multiple slides that use the same master slide.  The required master slide will be already loaded into cache for the end-user. 

Hmm, interesting - I was hoping that was the case.  

Does that mean only master slides cache for the end-user, or does each slide layout cache too?  If only the former, then I can see the sense in having multiple master slides to aid loading time.

Have already submitted a case regarding the flickering - Support are onto it.

As a further point... I make it a habit to delete any master slides that PPT creates and I'm not using. I find it speeds up publishing slightly.

I.e. delete any blank masters or layouts?  Cool.

Exactly. I try to limit the number of page types (master slides) I have to about 5. PPT helpfully creates a dozen at least, so I delete the extras.

The speed up is not tremendous, but I find I end up publishing each course 20-50 times in the course of building it to test, so even a minute or two can add up.

sean