How To Create Flash Cards On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at a simple way to create flash cards on your Mac.

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Now while there are apps you can download and websites that you can subscribe to that allow you to create flash cards you can do so on your Mac simply using Keynote. You usually use Keynote for presentations. But you can make each slide a flash card.

So let's start with a theme here. You can choose just about any theme you want. Basic white and basic black will work. I'm going to choose something a little more fun here. I'm going to use the graph paper theme under Portfolio. Then once I'm in here I can take a look at the different slides by clicking Add Slide. Now we want a slide that's going to work well as a flash card. Something that has two parts to it. The question and the answer. Now Title and Subtitle slide here will work really well and they will in most things. But there are other options as well.

For instance the Quote one might work too. But we'll stick with Title and Subtitle and since that's the first template slide here it is the one we get as a default slide. Now we want to change this a little bit to make it look a little bit more like a flash card. We want to give it a lot more room so we can have longer pieces of text in both the question and answer section. So I'm going to go to View and then Edit Master Slides. It's going to allow us to edit any of these templates that we want. But it's going to start with the one that we are currently using which is exactly what we want to edit.

So here you can see there are two text boxes. Let's make each one a little bit bigger. So I'm going to stretch this one to go near the top and make it fill most of the slide. I'm also going to take this one and move it down and stretch it for most of the bottom of the slide. So now I've got two portions like that. I also want to select each one and then go to Format, and Text and there find the vertical alignment for the slide. So I'm going to set it to Center so it centers the text in there. The same thing for here. I'm going to center it.

Now I can play with the colors, the fonts, everything in these while I'm editing this template. One of the things I want to do is make this section here a little bit bigger. The font is a little small so I'm going to increase the size and make it something a little bit bigger. You'll notice that since it has five lines of sample text here it's not actually going to grow any because it's set to Shrink to Fit. But that's fine. We want to leave it like that but maybe bring it up to something like maybe 85 pt. Then I'm going to click Update here to update the subtitle style..

So now I've got that all set. I'm going to click Done and now I've got my template. So let's go and put some information in these slides. So I'm going to double click in here to Edit this. I'm going to paste in some text. Then I'm going to do the same thing for the answer here below and paste it in. Now I've got a slide here with a question and answer. I like that using Shrink to Fit is really going to make the text fit even if it's a little bit bigger on one slide than another. The setting for Text to Fit is under Format, Text, and then Layout. You can see Shrink Text to Fit. That's for both of these and is turned On.

Now before we add another slide there's something we need to take care of. If we Play this presentation here we could see everything is presented. That's not a very good flash card. You see the answer right away. You don't get a chance to think about it first and try to guess before the answer is revealed. What we're going to do is make it so that the answer here doesn't show up right away. I'm going to select it and I'm going to go to Animate and then Build-In here, Add an Effect. Now you could use anyone of these build-in effects. Or you can just us Appear and it will just appear quickly on the screen.

But to have a little more fun with it you may want to choose something. Let's just do Dissolve. You can see it dissolve in. Now if we click Build Order here at the bottom we can see it set to Start on Click which is what we want. So now when I hit Play you can see the answer doesn't appear. If I click then I see it appears. I could also just hit the spacebar or the right arrow. So this is exactly what we want. It would be great to set the template to always have this appear with a dissolve like that. But unfortunately you can't put animations into a template slide.

So in order to get this on every slide that we produce instead of adding a new slide and adding a new title and subtitle template we are just going to duplicate this. So I can select it and I can do Edit and Duplicate Selection. But Command D is a little easier. So I duplicate and now I have slide 2. Now I can just paste a new text into here. So I'll paste in a question and I'll paste in an answer. That's two different slides. Two different cards now. So let's create a bunch of different ones by using Command D to duplicate and then by typing in new text into each one of these or copying and pasting from another document or something.

So now I've got my slides here. I can click on the first one. I can click Play and I can go through each one using a click, a spacebar or right arrow to reveal the answer and then go to the next slide after that. So I can review all of this and get ready for my philosophy test.

Now one of the things you can't easily do in Keynote is to shuffle these. There are a couple of ways to give yourself a random one to go through. One is that you can switch the view to Light Table. This shows them all like this. You can even shrink them down so you can barely see what they are. Then you can drag and drop these around really easily. So you can do kind of your own shuffle. You can even select one and then hold the Command key down and select another one and then drag those three around and that allows you to kind of quickly sort them in a weird random order. So once you've done that a bunch clear your mind a bit and then you can go back to the first one, Play, and they'll appear in a new order.

You could also Print these. Now you'll think, well now wait a minute the answer will be on the same piece of paper as the question. But you can go and print each separately. So if I say Print and lets click Show Details here you could see each slide like that. But if I select Print Each Stage of Build you could see the number of slides doubles to fourteen. I have the first slide which is the question, the next one with the question and answer. Now I've got basically a front and back for different slides. You might even be able to print these on both sides of a sheet of paper if you have a fancy enough printer.

So here's an easy way to print some flash cards on your Mac that you can use to study.