Introduction

Congratulations! You've just bought and installed Articulate Studio '09, one of the most popular and easiest to use e-learning development tools available in today's market. Sure there are other tools, but among corporate users, Articulate is a popular choice. Why is this? Because their organizations have already been working on the Microsoft Office platform and they are used to working in Microsoft PowerPoint. As a matter of fact, many of them have huge libraries of training materials that they have already developed for use in PowerPoint. When making the decision to transition to an e-learning platform, their familiarity with PowerPoint makes the transition easy.

Articulate Studio is a complete suite that comes with four applications, namely Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker, and Video Encoder. These four applications work together, and in some cases individually, to help you produce a Flash-based, e-learning course with minimal programming expertise.

We're going to start out by focusing on Articulate Presenter. This application is not a standalone application like the others in the suite; instead it is a PowerPoint plugin. In other words, you need to have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on your computer in order to use Articulate Presenter.

Note

Additionally, you need to be aware that Articulate Studio is a Windows-only application. It will not work with the Mac OSX versions of Microsoft Office. However, if you are on a Mac-based system, you may install Windows through the use of programs such as boot camp (which comes preinstalled in Mac OSX) or emulation software such as Parallels and VMWare Fusion.