Feel like a party? Organize a pub quiz! At the football club, during long holiday evenings or just in between with friends: a pub quiz guarantees a few pleasant hours. Ready-made quizzes can be found on the internet, but it is more fun to make your own. It is not difficult: this is how you make a pub quiz in PowerPoint.
Question 01: What is a pub quiz?
The pub quiz is a phenomenon that has come over from England. On a fixed evening of the week, a quiz is organized in many village pubs in which teams often compete for the main prize. The quiz often consists of several rounds: a round with photos, a round with sound clips and a historical round – but this is not necessary. You can come up with questions about any topic you want and of course just put in the village news, the latest gossip and above all a lot of trivial facts. That's what makes it exciting and fun. You have all the freedom to make something fun out of it just the way you want.
Question 02: Which PowerPoint is the Best?
The newer the version of PowerPoint is, the more useful functions it contains and the more options you have with each function to fine-tune each of those functions exactly the way you want. Therefore, the correct answer to this question is: any version of PowerPoint is good, but the latest is the best and at the moment it is PowerPoint 2016. However, PowerPoint 2013 and to a lesser extent 2010 are also good to use. Do use the Windows version, so not one of the PowerPoint apps for iOS or Android, nor the online web application. They all have far fewer options. PowerPoint 2016 for Mac is again very usable, but sometimes differs a lot from the Windows version used in this article. Earlier Mac versions of PowerPoint are less useful for creating a pub quiz.
Question 03: How do I get questions?
Questions are of course an essential part of your pub quiz. It is quite difficult to come up with questions just like that, but with the internet you have an endless source of facts and events at your fingertips. News websites are also a good source. Do you have a topic for a question but still insufficient information, then search further via the well-known search engines or look at www.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is also very useful if you don't have a topic yet. Just start searching from the main page; you are guaranteed to find a nice subject very quickly and all kinds of visual material to which you can think of a question. The Wikipedia section Trivia deserves special attention, good for fun facts. If you have come up with a question, do not forget to write down the correct answer immediately. This will prevent you from having to search again later.
Question 04: When do I start?
Finding nice questions is quite difficult and making a nice pub quiz takes a lot of time. You can therefore not start early enough and that certainly applies to collecting the questions and answers. You make it a lot easier for yourself by putting a document on OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox and, every time you come across something nice or striking online, use the information that is needed to turn it into a question later. It is often sufficient to paste the URL of a news item or photo into the document. Because the document is in the cloud, you can always complete it from any device. In this way you almost unnoticed collect enough questions and answers for a fun pub quiz.
The personal touch
If you are organizing a pub quiz for friends or family, it is extra fun to include some questions about the participants themselves. You can of course search their Twitter or Facebook page for this, but you can also ask all participants a few questions by email a few weeks before the pub quiz. Fun questions are, for example, “What is your biggest blunder in 2017?” or “What is your favorite holiday country?”. You can simply use the answers, but you can also combine them into generic questions such as “How many of us would prefer to go on holiday to France?” or “How many of us play in the Postcode lottery just to not be the only one around without a ticket when the prize falls?”. You will notice: questions like this do great in a pub quiz with family and friends!
A pub quiz is an ideal activity for a pleasant evening with friends or family Question 05: What is the best format?
Now that we have the topics, let's start with the quiz. We create them in PowerPoint. But a pub quiz is not a presentation and you should definitely take this into account when designing. First of all, it is important that the participants in the pub quiz be able to read the questions well. The same also applies to photos, videos and sound fragments: they must be clearly visible and intelligible. The biggest trap is to make the pub quiz too busy. Busyness is distracting and a funny question or answer is much more fun than a moving gif. Try to stick to the following rules as much as possible: limit the use of color but ensure a clear contrast between the text of questions and answers on the one hand and the background on the other, only use animations when they are really necessary for a question, do not use animated gifs , use only high-resolution photos, preferably use only one photo per slide, preferably use one color for all text and automate the pub quiz as much as possible. Many of these topics will be discussed later.
Organize
A pub quiz in PowerPoint, with all those photos, videos, sound clips, quickly becomes a large and complex file. It is therefore smart to organize everything you use properly. And that certainly applies if you do the pub quiz on a different computer than the one you will eventually give it with. Even though all videos and photos are included in the presentation, it is better to have them at hand and to be able to find them quickly. Open Windows Explorer and click Documents. Create a folder named pub quiz and open it by double clicking on the folder. Then create several subfolders within this folder: Photos, Videos, Sound, Sources, Answers. Place the PowerPoint of the pub quiz itself in the main folder and first save all the parts you use in the correct folder and only then import them into PowerPoint.
Question 06: Can I use photos?
Of course! Photos are an important part of a pub quiz. You can ask a question with a photo, but you can also use a photo to give a hint or to lead the participants astray. Photos are also very suitable as a comic relief to a question. Preferably use only one photo on a slide. Create a new slide and right click on the slide and choose Layout / Empty. Then choose Insert / Pictures and select the photo you want to use. Confirm with Insert. Now zoom out so far that you can see the entire slide. Then drag the photo so that it fills the entire slide. If the aspect ratio doesn't quite match the shape of the slide, make the photo wider or taller by dragging one of the side handles with the mouse. If the aspect ratios go wrong, enlarge the entire photo by dragging one of the handles on the corners and then move the photo relative to the slide so that the part that is important to the question remains clearly visible.
Question 07: Where can I find good photos?
If you don't have your own photos, then the internet is again a grateful source. Especially the search engines are worth their weight in gold here, especially when you use the extra search options. Start the web browser and go to www.google.nl. In the search box, type the subject for which you are looking for a photo. The more terms you use, the more specific the photos you will find. However, do not use too many terms: there is a good chance that you will not find any photos at all, even if there are actually some. Then click To search. Then click Pictures and after that Tools / Size / Large. This way you only get the high-resolution photos. Other useful options to use for filtering are Color / Black & White if you are specifically looking for black and white and old photos and Usage rights if you are only looking for photos that you can also reuse without violating copyrights. If you are looking for photos of relatives, friends or colleagues, check their Facebook page or Twitter account, there is often more than they (want to) know themselves...
Foreground, Background, Group
As soon as you start working more intensively with media in PowerPoint, you come into contact with some lesser-known functions. If you have selected a photo or other part, you can layout on the ribbon choose Toforward, Tobehind. This allows you to determine in overlapping parts what comes first and what comes after. A second handy feature is group. If you have several photos that belong together, select them all by first clicking on the first photo and then using the Ctrl-key clicking on all the other photos. When they are all selected, click Formatting / Grouping / Grouping. PowerPoint now merges them into one photo that you can move, resize, or apply a formatting filter to. Through Format / Group / Ungroup you can always separate the parts from each other.
