Getting Creative with Articulate Engage: Add 2 Interactions to 1 Slide

This guest blog post is by Articulate Customer Support Engineer David Fair.

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You probably already know that you can use Articulate Engage to add interactivity to your presentations, but did you know that there’s a way you can add two Engage interactions to the same slide to give your presentation some extra sizzle? Since this method involves some post-publish file manipulation, it’s not officially Articulate-supported, but I wanted to share it for the adventurous folks out there who are looking for new and creative ways to get a little more mileage and flexibility out of their Engage content.

As an example, here’s a screenshot of what a presentation might look like if you added both a Circle Diagram and a Media Tour interaction to a single slide in your Articulate Presenter presentation:

Some ways you might use this approach

Let’s take a quick look at some cases where this approach might come in handy. In the following screencast, we’ll see published examples of stacked interactions, side-by-side comparisons, as well as using Engage as a video player:

View this screencast at Screenr

Step 1: Insert One Interaction as a Web Object

Now let’s get to the how-tos. The trick is to insert one Engage interaction as Web Object, and the other as a Flash movie.

So let’s start by inserting the first interaction as a Web Object. You’ll need to publish an Engage interaction for Web, and then make a few modifications to the published output before inserting it into your presentation. Here’s how:

View this screencast at Screenr

Bear in mind that the smaller your interactions are on the slide, the smaller the text will be. So, when you’re building your Engage interactions, you might want to use bigger font types for the Engage player font, and bigger font types and sizes for your Engage content.

Step 2: Insert Another Interaction as Flash Movie

Next, you’ll insert the second interaction into your presentation as a Flash movie. Just like before, you’ll need to publish your Engage interaction for Web. But this time, you’ll change some file names in your published output before inserting the interaction into your presentation. Here’s how:

View this screencast at Screenr

As I show in the screencast above, you’ll need to copy the renamed engage_content.swf folder from your interaction over to your published presentation each time you re-publish the presentation, so don’t forget that important step!

Helpful Tips

The following screencast describes a few things to consider when adding two interactions to the same slide, including:

• Relative sizes of your Web Object and Flash movie: You’ll find that the Web Object placeholder needs to be slightly larger than the Flash Movie placeholder in PowerPoint if you want your interactions to appear the same size in your published presentation. Getting the size and placement of both interactions just right will take some trial-and-error, but the end result will be worth it!
• Colorpix: Colorpix is a great little tool for identifying color codes if you want to make your Engage interaction look totally seamless on your slide. It’s free, so give it a try!
• Removing the Presenter sidebar: If you use the No Sidebar view mode in Articulate Presenter, you’ll have a little more screen area to work with, which means your interactions can be bigger.

View this screencast at Screenr

Questions or feedback?

If you have questions or feedback about this approach, feel free to start a thread in the Community Forums, and we can discuss it. I look forward to seeing how you use this technique!