Next button not operating properly when using Restricted for navigation?

May 04, 2015

Rod Schmidt
By Rod Schmidt

Hello all. Articulate Presenter 13 here.

I have a presentation set up using Restricted for the slide navigation. That works just fine. The user can view previous slides but can't advance or use the outline navigation unless they have already reviewed the material.

On one slide, I have three hyperlinks in Powerpoint that link to three other slides. Once the student has reviewed all three, the Next button appears.

The Next button branching in the three review slides is set to go to a specific slide.

Here is the issue; the Next button is NOT going to that slide. Instead, you have to click the Next button three times and THEN it goes to the correct slide.

It doesn't change slides when being clicked until you click it three times.

My guess is that it is using one click for each of the three slides it is bypassing; my question is, why? This rather contradicts the concept of branching.

Essentially, once the user reviews the material in the three slides, the next button needs to go directly to a specific slide.

Any ideas on why this may not be working?

Thank you!

 

5 Replies
Rod Schmidt
almost 9 years ago05/05/15 at 1:33 pm (UTC)

Hello Emily.... thank you for your reply!

All of the slides in the presentation are unlocked. The Articulate player has been set to Restricted. This functions perfectly; the user can go to the other slides by clicking the hyperlinks, can navigate to previous slides, but cannot advance using the sidebar menu.

I agree that it seems to be an issue with the timeline; in essence, because the NEXT button is not being used to go to the other slides, when the NEXT button appears, even though it has been told in branching to go to a different slide, you have to click it multiple times... as though it is still advancing slides in the background until it gets to the correct slide.

Unfortunately, I can't share the Presenter Package; I am developing on a closed system.

The issue is easily re-created, however.

  1. Open PowerPoint and create a presentation with five blank slides.
  2. Set a text title for each slide (I used Test Page 1, Test Page 2, etc).
  3. Use the rectangle shape tool and create three buttons (I made them different colors, but that isn't a necessity).
  4. Hyperlink the three buttons to the next three slides (the first button to slide 2, the second button to slide 3, and the the third button to slide 4).
  5. Copy the buttons to slides 2, 3, and 4. For my test, I added text next to the buttons identifying the button pressed. My first button was orange, so on slide 2, I put text in that said "Orange Section text - you have navigated here by clicking the orange button. Again, that isn't a necessity, as long as you can tell you have navigated to the correct slide.
  6. On each slide, I removed the hyperlink for the button linked to the slide. From my example above, on the slide that the orange button linked to, I removed the orange button hyperlink (no reason to have it, since they are already on the linked slide).
  7. In Slide Properties, I set each slide for the following;
    1. Advance by user
    2. Navigation Free
    3. Presenter None
    4. Audio Playlist None
    5. Controls for each slide set to:
      1. Slide 1: None
      2. Slides 2, 3: Prev
      3. Slides 4, 5: Prev, Next
    6. On slide 4, Branching for the Next button is set to Slide 5.
    7. In the Player Properties > Menu > Additional Options, Navigation Restriction is set to Restricted.

When published, the user can navigate to slides 2, 3, and 4 by using the hyperlinks. On slide 4, the Next button is present. However, even though the Next button is set to go to slide 5 in the navigation, it still counts the frames off in the background.

Even when the Next button is set to simply go to the next slide in Branching, it still requires a number of clicks equal to the slide number before it will navigate to the next slide.

This is the issue I am having.

Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me.

Emily Ruby
almost 9 years ago05/05/15 at 2:13 pm (UTC)

Hi Rod,

Thanks for the information. I did set this up, and it is working as designed. Slide 4 will not advance until the timeline ends if you have the Player set to restricted. You could go under the Articulate tab, Options, and you can set any slides without Audio/video/animation to 1 second. This should allow you to click Next right away when you get to slide 4.

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