Building a Quiz With Mac Keynote

Keynote presentations don't have to be linear. You can use links to jump to any slide. With these links you can turn a Keynote presentation into a simple interactive quiz. This can be used in classroom or marketing situations.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to build an interactive quiz using Keynote on a Mac.
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So you can use Keynote for a lot more than just building linear presentations that go from slide to slide. By using the functionality of being able to link to a slide from some text or an object you can create interactive quizzes to someone playing the Keynote presentation on their Mac, iPad, or iPhone could choose from a list of answers and then will jump to the appropriate slide depending upon what they select. 
So in Keynote here let's just start off with a simple basic white presentation. We'll create a title slide here. Let's add a new slide and I'm just going to make it a blank slide. On this slide I'm going to ask the first question. So, let's create a text box here and I'll put the question. Now let's make it a larger font size so I'm going to go to Format, Text over here and I'm going to increase the font size, let's say to 80, and make it Bold, and let's make the text color black. Then I'm going to move this to the top of the screen right here. Let's go ahead and for text here, you can see this is the Caption format which is what a text box will automatically use. Let's update that style. So from now on every new text box we create will use this style here. Now let's put some answers here. I'm going to create a text box and I'm going to type the first answer. Let's put that up here a little bit. I'm going to add three more answers. I'm going to Option Drag to duplicate this and then change the text. As you can see when I Option Drag the third one it even allows me to space them evenly. Now let's make the font size for all of these a little bit smaller since maybe they should be a bit smaller than the question itself. Let's left justify this. So under Format, Text do Left Justify and then I'm going to go to Arrange, Align Objects, Align Left like that. 
So let's make this more interesting by dragging an image. I'm just going to Drag and Drop an image in here. Just a photo here. Expand it a bit. Go into Arrange and send it to the back. It's a bit bright so I'm going to go to Format, Image and then I'm going to the Adjust Image button there and let's decrease the contrast quite a bit so it kind of fades into the background like that. So now the user should be able to click and choose one of these answers. But let's actually create a place for them to click on. A button. I'm going to use a shape here. I'm going to use a circle. Take the circle and put it to the left here of this answer. Let's go into Format, Style and change the color fill a little bit. Let's make it a dark blue and maybe with a line border there that's white so it stands out. Like that. So that's the button to click on. I'm going to Option Drag to create four of these like that. So the idea is you click on one of these to choose your answer. 
Now let's have the first answer. I'm going to duplicate the slide. Select the slide and Duplicate Selection or Command D. I'm going to take away the other answers and the button to click on. So if you click on the first one you go to this screen right here. Let's now put a description of this answer here. I'm going to add another text box here and then paste in an answer here. Let's also make that something smaller like that. Maybe even change the color since this is a wrong answer. Let's change the text color to a dark red there. Let's maybe move that down towards the bottom like that. Now we want to have a way, since the answer is wrong, to get back to the question so that we can try another answer. So let's add another shape here. I'm going to add a rounded rectangle like that. Let's change the color to red there since it's the wrong answer. Add a border and we'll put that at the bottom here. Put text in it, Back or we can say Try Again or something like that. So you click here and then you'll go here and then you get to go back here. 
Let's put the other answers in play. So I'm going to duplicate this and go here and take the second answer. Copy that. Paste that in here like that and then I'm going to change the text underneath. You know this text could be something informative. So you have something like that. Let's duplicate the slide again and let's do the same thing. Here is the next incorrect answer. This one. Put it in there and then we have a bit of information about that incorrect answer. Duplicate again and grab this one here. That's the correct answer. So you've got that. Let's change this button here and have it be green instead to indicate correct. Also the text here. Let's make that green.Then it will do Continue because you'll go to the next question. So let's wire this all up.
Here, if you click here, you should go to slide number 3. So select that. Go to Format, Add Link we can add a link to a slide. Note that the keyboard shortcut is Command K. It's a good think there's a default shortcut for that because we're going to use it a lot. So, we'll do that and we'll say we'll go to slide number 3. Then we'll select this and we'll do Command K and we'll do slide 4. Then we'll do this one, Command K, we'll do slide 5 and this one Command K we'll do slide 6. Now we need to have the appropriate link here for this button. So this Back button here we should have it go to slide 2 which is that question there. So we're going to do that for each one of these. If we had actually done that when we created the first wrong answer then when we duplicated the slide it would have just carried over so it would have been easier to do it then. Now we have a way to get back. For this one it's actually going to go to the next question.  
So I want to go to this question here. I'm going to duplicate it, drag it down there. This will be the next question so put another question in there. I'm not going to worry about the answers right now like that but I want to have this here linked to the next question. So this will go to slide 7. So let's try this out so far. If I hit Play I have to advance to the next slide so I will click the right arrow there. I'm on this slide with the questions. Here are the buttons. You can see the pointer even changes to a hand when I'm over each one of these. Let's click here. Goes there. We can go back here and go back here, back and here. This one goes to the next question. 
So let's go and continue to do things. Let's add a sound to this. I can Drag and Drop a sound here just onto the slide and drop it in. That's the wrong answer sound. I'm going to stick it up here in the upper right hand corner and you could see it's Start Audio on Click. No, I want it to start automatically. Then with it selected I'm going to Copy it and Paste it here, Paste it here, but here I'm going to drag another sound. So, stick that there. This one won't start on click either. So now we can go here, Play. So now we have the sounds to go along with the wrong and correct answers. We also may want to add a button to this screen to get started. So let's go here and Copy this button here and Paste it in. Change this to Start. This one will click here in this little Link icon there and we'll do Edit. This one will lead to slide 2. Now we have a way to actually get from the Intro to the first question. 
We could color these up a little bit more. Let's go and put a little graphic here to represent the fact that this question is wrong. So we can put it like that. Little sad wombat. Copy the sad wombat to each one of these. Then here we can do the same thing but I'm going to replace. I have a happy wombat there. So, of course, what we would do now is we would create this question here and then maybe we would duplicate one of these answers and stick it down here and have a wrong answer for this one, like that. Change this text, change this text, and make sure we change this to actually go back to, in this case, slide 7 where the question is. So this one here would with this answer go to slide 8. The great thing is that even though you need to specify a number for slides, watch what happens if I were to insert an extra slide. Like I had a second introductory screen. If I go here now, I look, and this is now slide 4. It has moved down automatically. So you can insert slides and the slide links will actually continue to work. 
So we're not quite done because, if you were to go and play this, say I'm right here, I can use the right arrow to simply go to the next slide. We don't want that. So under the Document Sidebar there are a couple of slideshow settings. First is we want to automatically play upon open. That will make things a little bit easier. Also we want to change the presentation type to Links Only. So now the arrow keys won't work. Another thing we can do is if this is going to play in a kind of kiosk mode or maybe it's on a computer that somebody can walk up to and start using if they stop in the middle of the quiz or perhaps at the end we put a slide saying, you know, thanks for playing and then there's a Continue button. We want it to automatically go back to the beginning. So we can do Restart Slideshow if idle for 5 minutes. So if it sits there for five minutes by itself it will go back to the beginning. We could also put some music on this. We could add another sound here that's maybe a piece of music and when we do that we can have it loop and then have kind of an attraction loop. So you can have this be something much more interesting and even put a video on it if you want. Drag and Drop some sort of video here and then that way if it's on slide one it looks kind of interesting. Somebody walks up to it and they press the Start button and then it goes to the first question. 
So those are the basics of how to do there. You just need to keep adding more questions. Obviously you could do all sorts of things with this. For instance, the questionnaire could actually have an image on it and the question is related to that image. Or it could even be a video or a sound. So you could use all sorts of media in a quiz presentation like this since Keynote handles those things pretty easily. But there are limitations. Here's what you can't do. You can't randomize the order of the answers, of course, because they're static on the page. You can't randomize the order of the questions either. It's all going to be hardwired in as to which question is first and you can't keep a running tally of how many times they got something right or wrong. Keynote just doesn't have that kind of functionality in it. Another thing you can't do is you can't prevent somebody from leaving the presentation. They can't use the forward arrow key or spacebar, or anything like that. They have to click on a link to go somewhere. But you can always hit the Escape key to exit. So it's not great for completely unmanned kiosks but it does work really well in a classroom situation or perhaps in a convention center expo type of situation where the computer is running and people can go up to it and there's somebody there to kind of keep an eye on it. Of course you can also use this as an actual real presentation. Putting some slides like this up on the screen and asking for audience participation for answering the questions. Or perhaps you can just be the presenter and choose wrong answers and then the right answer to then make a point. 
Hope you found this useful and hope it gives you some ideas of more things you can do with Keynote. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Building a Quiz With Mac Keynote”

3 years ago

@Master Gary What a great tutorial. You nailed it. You are the BEST Mac geek out there. Thank You so much.

Jacques

Can you embed it in a web page or export it to a format windows users can use?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jacques: You can export as HTML and upload to a website via FTP if you have your own site with that capability. Try it and see. You can export as PowerPoint, but I would test it thoroughly as Keynote and PowerPoint are different apps with different features.

Robert Emmett

Nice. I didn't know about some of those things.

JamesA

Very helpful. As a teacher in Australian lock-down, providing engaging material for my high-school students is a challenge. Your presentation smoothed the learning curve for me. Many thanks.

hansol

very useful making quiz in keynote. I wish you will make more about quiz topic.

Comments Closed.

Building a Quiz With Mac Keynote

Comments: 6 Responses to “Building a Quiz With Mac Keynote”

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