Technology Black Hole

This past week has been a technology black hole.  I decided to use Captivate for a project in one of my classes so I could learn more about it. (I give this advice to my students, "the only way to learn a tool is to use it").  It took a lot of time, more than the 3 hours allotted for the project.  I did learn many things including how to include a video and how to animate text.  Unfortunately, the program imploded on me during the publishing and no matter what I did (uninstall, reinstall, etc.) it would not run again.  In addition, my file became corrupted and the program lost track of it so all of my changes had been lost even though I saved it many times.  Since I could not get the program to run, I did what any person with VMware on their machine would do, I created a new VM.  It was long overdue since I was still using Windows 8.  I had created a Windows 10 VM but had not switched over.  It seemed now was the time.  So for the last several days, I have been reinstalling software into my new environment.  Good news, everything is working fine so far.  I did learn some lessons with Captivate.  #1- always save your project in two different places so that if it fails during rendering your original file is safe. #2- be careful when using videos, make sure they are compressed as much as possible and try not to use too many as this puts stress on the publishing process.