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.