If you find yourself losing track of the Quizmaker and Engage files for your Articulate presentations, you might be interested in the PowerPoint 2007/2010 Add-In called “Project Beacon”. I developed this PowerPoint Add-In to assist Articulate Presenter Users with keeping their projects linked and organized.

Before I dive right into the Project Beacon and its usage, I feel it’s important to understand why I developed this. If you would like to skip the ugly details and get right to the Add-In, please click here.

Send to Articulate Presenter Package Summary

If you want to back up all of your Presenter ’09 project files for safe keeping or send them to your collaborators working on the same project – or just send your project to another computer, Presenter ’09 provides a simple and effective tool to package all the necessary files into one zip file. This Send to Articulate Presenter Package feature creates a package of the contents of Presenter ’09, along with any embedded Engage, Quizmaker and other inserted media files (such as Flash movies) so they can be edited on another computer.

… but did you know …

all of the absolute path data for Quizmaker and Engage project files (.quiz and .intr) is stripped from the project?

Who cares! Why does this concern me?

In the simplest terms, by stripping the absolute path data associated with Quizmaker and Engage project files,  a collaborator on another system can extract the Articulate Package and Presenter will not attempt to access the Quizmaker or Engage project files from the original location when editing.

OK, that’s nice but I still don’t see why this should concern me!

Whether you have just one or hundreds of Engage interactions or Quizmaker quizzes in your Articulate Presenter project, when using the Send to Articulate Presenter Package a second time (“Repackage” if you will), Articulate Presenter will not add your Engage or Quizmaker project files if you did not edit them; this is by design and eliminates the possibility of packaging the wrong project file if the end user chose to move the extracted files.

The workaround to the above  issue, is to manually add all of the .intr and .quiz project files to the new Articulate Presenter “Repackage” or select the ‘Edit in Engage’ or ‘Edit in Quizmaker’ buttons followed by ‘Save and Return to Presenter’ button for each slide or tab containing these modules. Both of these workarounds would have to be performed every time a user attempts to “Repackage” an Articulate Presenter Package. Not anymore …

Project Beacon v1.0 Released!

This utility can be used to perform the following:

1. Check for valid Engage and Quizmaker project links inside your Articulate Presenter project.
2. Automatically link all Engage and Quizmaker project links with a single click.
3. Generate a report,  listing all Engage and Quizmaker project files along with full directory paths.
4. Identify any broken Engage and Quizmaker project file paths.
5. Donate to your favorite developer :-)

When loaded into PowerPoint 2007 or 2010, this Add-in will appear under the Add-Ins menu or ribbon.

The usage is simple…

Download and Install:

1. Download the ProjectBeacon_v1.0.zip
2. Extract the contents of the ProjectBeacon_v1.0.zip file by right-clicking and selecting Extract.
3. Locate the Extracted files and double-click the setup.exe file.
4. Follow the Installation Wizard Instructions.

Usage:

1. Start by opening any PowerPoint project, preferably one containing quizzes or interactions.
2. Select the ‘Check Links’ button to get feedback in a message window indicating if there are any links that need to be updated.

If any files are identified as not linked:
– Either choose ‘Yes’ to Attempt to Auto Link or ‘No’ to do nothing.

3. Use the ‘Auto Link’ button to quickly relink a newly extracted Articulate Presenter Package.
4. Use the ‘Generate Report’ button to get a full list of quizzes and interactions that are part of your project along with the link status and path.
5. Use the ‘Donate‘ button to, link back to the donation portion of my site.

All button actions will always give feedback as to what was performed or if any files could not be located. After attempting to Auto Link if the feedback states only some of the files have been updated, simply use the ‘Generate Report’ button again, to identify the offending file.

Note: The Project Beacon PowerPoint Add-in is not supported by Articulate, and is provided as is. However, I have tested this extensively and found this to work without any issues.

Additional Information and Links

Download: ProjectBeacon_v1.0.zip

Articulate Help Document: Send To Articulate Presenter Package
Articulate KB Article: Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes do not get included in Articulate Presenter Package