Tables in Captivate

If you are producing learning materials, especially for school or college courses, then sooner or later you are going to need to include tables of data (and some courses will need a lot!) Therefore it is rather strange that Adobe Captivate (at least up to v8, i haven't used later ones - yet) has such poor functionality for tables. There is a table tool but it is very limited and fiddly, and doesn't allow you to apply any formatting selectively to the data.

Luckily there is a way around this. Captivate can import HTML5 to embed into a slide by clicking on Media and then selecting "HTML5 Animation".

Now this was originally intended for HTML5 animations of course but luckily Captivate doesn't care what the HTML is you import, as long as it's zipped up. So you can create your tables in HTML and import them that way. I was so relieved when I found out you could do this, I was working on a Nutrition Consultant course at the time which needed a lot of tables!

This is an example of a table I've embedded in a course slide. The heading and three lines of text are a normal Captivate textbox but below that is an imported HTML table (and a note underneath).

One important thing to remember is to make your HTML responsive (as you are making your course mobile friendly right?) It isn't hard to do, you just need to add a CSS media query in the HTML to make sure all your font sizes match Captivate. You can find out how to do media queries here.