Create a quiz in PowerPoint

Did you know that you can create a quiz in PowerPoint? You can create a simple quiz in PowerPoint using just hyperlinks. It’s simple because it doesn’t require any programming and you can’t grade it.

Students take the quiz in Slide Show view. When they choose the wrong answer, they go back to the question to try again. When they choose the right answer, they go to the next question.

Create the slides

Start with a title slide that explains the topic and includes instructions, as you see here. That Next button at the bottom right is a hyperlink–I’ll discuss the hyperlinks in the next section.

Create your first question slide. You can format this in any way you want. You can use the Title & Content layout and put the question in the Title. The Content section contains the answers. Type them and then convert the bulleted text to SmartArt. Finally, ungroup the SmartArt (twice). But you can also use the Title Only layout and manually insert shapes with the answers.

What’s important is that you use shapes with text in them because you want to add the hyperlinks to the shapes, not to the text. I recommend 3 or 4 answers–obviously one is correct and the rest are not. Here’s an example question slide.

Now create 2 more slides, one for when the person chooses the correct answer and one for when the person chooses the wrong answer. I call these the Right and Wrong feedback slides. Here are two examples.

Be sure to include the instructions as shown. Repeat the process for each question–a question slide and 2 feedback slides.

Create the hyperlinks

The 2nd step is to create the hyperlinks. For each question slide, follow these steps:

1. Select the shape that contains one of the wrong answers.
2. Choose Insert, Link/Hyperlink or press Ctrl+K.
3. In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click the Place in this Document on the left.
4. In the left box, choose the next slide that contains the Wrong Answer feedback.
5. Repeat for any other wrong answers.
6. Select the shape with the right answer and hyperlink it to the next slide that contains the Right Answer feedback.

You now need to create the system that brings people who choose the wrong answer back to the original question and brings people who choose the right answer to the next question. You could create small buttons, but you want to make the quiz fool-proof.

To do this, do the following:

1. Place a rectangle on top of the Wrong Answer feedback slide, covering the entire slide.
2. Right-click the rectangle and choose Format Shape.
3. Format the rectangle so that it has no outline.
4. In the task pane or dialog box (depending on your version of PowerPoint), make the shape 100% transparent. (There may be situations where this breaks the system, but they are rare. If you run into one, make the shape 99% transparent.)
5. Copy the rectangle and paste it onto all of the feedback slides in the quiz.
6. Go back to the first Wrong Answer feedback slide,  select the rectangle (just click, remember that it’s invisible), and add a hyperlink to the rectangle that goes back to the previous question. In this way, wherever the student clicks, the quiz goes back to the question that was not answered correctly.
7. Select the rectangle on the Right Answer feedback slide and hyperlink it to the next question.

Go into Slide Show view and test the quiz for the first question, choosing all of the possible answers. If it works, format the rest of the quiz in the same way.

Disallow clicking to the next slide

If a student clicks anywhere on the question slide that is not one of the answer shapes, PowerPoint will move to the next slide, generally the Wrong Answer feedback slide. You want to disallow this. Here’s how:

1. Choose Slide Show, Set Up Slide Show.
2. In the Set Up Show dialog box, choose Browsed at a Kiosk (Full Screen). This disallows clicking to forward the slides. All navigation must be by hyperlinks. Note: This checks the Loop Continuously Until Esc check box.
3. Click OK.

Test your quiz again and you’ll see that you can’t forward the slides when you click off a hyperlinked shape on any question slide.

When you get to the last slide, your student is stuck. This can be a good thing. After the last Right Answer feedback slide, you can have a closing slide that congratulates the student and provides an instruction to leave the presentation open. In a classroom situation, the teacher can use this method to verify that the student completed the quiz.

But if that doesn’t work in your situation, you can add a button that ends the quiz/presentation. Here’s the method:

1. Insert any shape on the last slide.
2. Choose Insert, Action.
3. Click the Hyperlink To option.
4. From the drop-down list, choose End Show.
5. Click OK.

Be sure to include instructions so that the students know they should click the End Show button.

Now, you need to add a button that gets the students from the title slide to the first question. Use the same method, but choose Next Slide from the drop-down list. You can also choose Insert, Hyperlink and choose the specific slide you want to go to, which should be the first question slide.

Test everything before distributing your quiz!

I explain another way to create a quiz using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in this post. VBA can be extended to provide more more complex functions, including grading.

You can use PowerPoint Mix to create quizzes, too. I explain how in this post.

Have you used PowerPoint to create quizzes? What is your experience? Leave a comment!