What is "Force Re-Publish All The Slides?"

Question

Captivate v5.5
Can anyone explain when you would select the "Force Re-Publish All The Slides" option within Publish ?
I have a feeling it has something to do with a project that you have made changes to after you have already published it, and you have to tell Captivate to update the changes before you publish the project again - but having to select this as an option that does not make much sense.
Maybe I have got it wrong.
Noel

Answer 1

Please forgive the long rant...but I feel strongly about this one.
As a former Technical Author who worked for software companies, I agree with the sentiment that Captivate's software documentation could be more complete and more accurate.  But, since my tiny little family company also now builds small bits of software (widgets) I'm also able to see Adobe's side of this current argument.  We get lots of customers or potential customers that think we should build something THEY personally happen to want, regardless of the fact that it would cost us ten times as much to build it as they would be willing to pay for it.  We pick our target features very carefully because otherwise we wouldn't make a dollar on widgets.  (We can actually make 5 times as much money just spending the same time building courses for paying clients as what we can programming and selling widgets.)
So, like it or not, it's Adobe's development budget for CP and they really don't have to ask our permission to use it...even if we DO pay for their software...any more than Ford or Chrysler should ask my permission to build a new model with XYZ feature because I once bought a car from them. If Adobe ask my opinion about what I'd like to see in the next version, I readily give it to them.  But that's a privilege they extend to me.  It's not my right as a paying customer to demand they take my advice and build what I want them to.  If I can make a good enough business case for a new feature I suggest, it might make it into the next version, but it might not because something or someone else has a better argument for where the money should go.  Some of my suggestions ARE now in Captivate 6.  A lot still aren't.  I personally don't fret about that.  I just get on with using the tool as best I can. 
I even set up the Captivate6IdeaScale site just after Cp5.5 came out to give other users a more visible voice in what features they wanted to see. That site is still up.  If you doubt that Adobe listens to its customers, go there and look at how many of the suggestions people posted are now in Captivate 6.
Honestly, no company wastes their development budget on things they KNOW will not work.  But picking which features will sell a product and which ones won't is notoriously difficult.  And whoever told you "The customer is always right" was lying to  make a sale of some kind or has never studied some classic business successes and failures of the past.  Predicting success is just NOT that easy, and customers are only experts about what THEY want, not what the overall market will respond to.  Read some recent books about "Innovation" and you will see that we would not have many of the current products we enjoy if it were always just up to customers to predict what would work and what would not.  Companies that can't get it right often enough go broke or get eaten by bigger fish.  Customers that can't pick good products are what keep a lot of these hopeless companies in business longer than they should be.  Take a good look at where Adobe is in the software world.  They're not doing too bad.  I certainly wish I owned the company.
At the moment a lot of what has gone into Captivate 6 has been about covering areas where Cp has been losing ground to other products.  Themes, the new SCORM drivers, Avatars and Clip Art figures, improved video capture, are just a few examples.  But I agree that Captivate 6 is having "teething problems" and I personally think it could have done with several more BETA versions before release.  However, having been on the BETA program myself, I also think it's possible many of the issues we are now seeing would NOT have been revealed by several more BETA versions anyway because the BETA team simply cannot cover all of the use cases and platforms where bugs will show up.  So getting the product out as quickly as possible (even though it was a dangerous gamble with stiff competition from Storyline now in the market) might in the long run have been the better move.  Who am I to say?  Which one of us has built or managed anything as big as Adobe, or even a product with as many users as Captivate so that we can sit in judgement of it?  I personally just DON'T think my business skills are THAT good.
I'm not defending Cp bugs...I can give you a long list of the ones I would like to see fixed too.  But anyone that has worked with Cp as long as I have is accustomed to seeing these sort of frustrated forum posts after every new version.  Does this mean that Captivate is a shoddy product?  I don't believe so.  I also happen to have Storyline in my toolbox (just in case one of my clients asks for it) and after buying it I also watched the Articulate forums daily for a while.  There were plenty of bugs being logged there too, despite the fact that SL went through about a dozen BETA versions before release.