Simple Quizzes in PowerPoint

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By Geetesh Bajaj

Creating a quiz in PowerPoint can be fun. You can use a quiz after a business presentation as an excuse to give away gifts to those who provide the right answers. Or you can use a quiz for children in elementary school. Whatever your aim, creating a quiz in any version of PowerPoint is fairly easy and intuitive.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to create a quiz with multiple answer choices. You can create more “featured” quizzes using VBA programming within PowerPoint or the Custom Shows feature, but for now, we are just creating a simple quiz. To start with, you need questions. Choose questions that can have only one correct answer. Five questions is a good number to start with.

Each question will require three slides:

The question slide
The correct message slide, and
The incorrect message slide

We also used five pictures; one each for our five questions to add visual content and relevance to the quiz. In this sample quiz, the visuals actually were part of the presentation. All pictures were sourced from Hemera’s Photo-Objects collection, a clip art collection that’s no longer available.

Follow these steps to create a simple quiz in PowerPoint:

Start PowerPoint and create a new, blank presentation. For the existing, blank slide, (or you can insert a new slide), you can change the layout to the Title Only layout. You can change layouts from the Layout gallery, shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: Change the slide layout
Type in your question in the Title placeholder. Plus, insert a picture on this PowerPoint slide.
Figure 2: Question slide
Now you need to insert text boxes or some other shapes. Add three of these text boxes or shapes below the picture. Type in the answers within the text boxes or shapes, as shown in Figure 3, below. Do note that only one of the answers needs to be correct. Format the text boxes or shapes with fills, lines, and effects.
Figure 3: Three choices
Create two more slides for each question slide. These are the correct and incorrect message slides. You can add your custom text within these slides. For example, on the correct message slide, we added an encouraging message and suggested respondents go to the next question. On the incorrect slide, we suggested responders go back to the question slide again and make another choice. You can see both these slides in Figures 4 and 5, below
Figure 4: Correct answer
Figure 5: Incorrect answer
Now go back to the question slide (see Figure 3, shown earlier on this page) and select the text box or shape that contains the correct answer. With the text box or shape selected, access the Insert tab of the Ribbon, and click the Action button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6, below.
Figure 6: Action button
Doing so will bring up the Action Settings dialog box that you can see in Figure 7, below. In the Mouse Click tab of this dialog box, activate the drop-down list in the Hyperlink to area and choose the Slide… option
Figure 7: Hyperlink to
This will bring up the Hyperlink to Slide dialog box. Within the Slide title list, select the correct message slide, highlighted in red within Figure 8, below. Once you select the slide, you will see a preview towards the right, highlighted in blue within Figure 8.
Figure 8: Hyperlink to Slide
In the same way, hyperlink the text boxes or shapes to the incorrect message slide.

You can download the finished presentation from our Let’s Start Counting page.

More Ideas

Here are some more ideas:

If you are using this quiz in a non-corporate environment, or with children, try to include some sounds within the Action Settings dialog box. For the right answer, we used the built-in Applause sound (see Figure 9). Similarly, for the wrong answer, we opted to use the Whoosh sound. These sounds are part of PowerPoint, but there’s no reason why you cannot use your own sounds in the same way.
Figure 9: Play sound
Select the Highlight click check-box in the Action Settings dialog box, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 9, below. Doing so inverts the colors used within the text box or shape while clicking on an answer option.
Figure 10: Highlight click check-box selected
Experiment with more options. Try changing fonts, pictures, sounds, etc. to make your quiz more interesting.

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