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Question slide formatting (Read 2702 times)
robva65
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Question slide formatting
14. May 2007 at 14:40
 
Aside from most problems experienced with Breeze/Presenter, Training modules, etc, one of the most troublesome items while working with Breeze questions has to be the way in which question slides re-format themselves after messing around with the Quiz Manager.
 
Ever since the first version of Breeze, there have been many reports of formatting problems...and the story usually goes like this:
 
You've just spent an enormous amount of time creating questions, making various selections and going about your work.  You then realize that you need to fix a question; change some wording, adding/changing an answer or two...whatever.  You click OK to go back to ppt...
 
Then it happens.
 
To your dismay, every single question slide has completely reformatted themselves!
 
For those of you on the latest versions of Presenter, according to Adobe, you shouldn't see reformatting of question slides, but for the rest of us (including me; my latest build is 267), any trip to the Quiz Manager invariably results in having to redo every bloody question slide.  
 
So what to do?
 
Although not entirely clean, I have experiemented with the following (which has reduced some of the amount of re-formatting, but it does mean that I've had to recheck every question slide)
 
By default, you get one set of slide/title masters with every ppt deck.  Therein lies the problem.  Depending on how you've created the look and feel of your presentation, the question slides have the same formatting applied as governed by the slide master of your ppt deck.
 
STEP 1. Create a new set of slide masters.  In ppt, go to View from the main menu.  Trace down to Master and select Slide Master.  Usually, you'll see a set of slide thumbnails on the left side.  Within the thumbnail area, if you right-click, you should get a contextual menu with an option to add a "New Slide Master".  Having another set of slide masters is going to pave the way to fixing some of the formatting problems with question slides.
 
STEP 2. Copy any objects, treatments, styling from the original slide master into the newly created slide master.  This will ensure design consistency between the masters.
 
STEP 3. Make whatever adjustments necessary so that you have the kind of formatting you'd like to see on your question slides.
 
STEP 4. ...and this one's really important...what we need to do now is identify the new slide master.  Reason: since the slide masters look alike, it might be hard to tell them apart, and the bigger picture here is that we need to assign the new master to the question slides ONLY.  So...select the new slide master (it should have a bold-looking highlight around the thumbnail), and then right click it!  From the menu that appears, select "Rename Master".  Give it a new name ("Question Master" might be a good one!), then click the Rename button and you're done.
 
STEP 5.  Click on View in the main menu, and select Normal.  Then click on Format in the main menu and select Slide Design, which will bring up another set of thumbnail images...only this time, you should see 2 versions of your slide masters!  If you hover your mouse over each of the thumbnails, a "tooltip" will appear with the title of the thumbnail that you just created.
 
STEP 6.  All that's necessary now is to apply the new slide master to the question slides in your deck.  Before you start clicking away here, let me recommend the following:  select the slide that you want to apply the new master to, and then, move your mouse over the slide master thumbnail in the Slide Design viewer....DON'T CLICK YET!  When you move your mouse over the thumbnail first, you should get a drop down arrow that appears over the thumbnail.  Click the downward-facing arrow and select "Apply to Selected Slide".  That's it!  
 
Visually speaking, not much may have changed.  The pay-off, however, is when you have to go back into Quiz Manager and edit stuff.  Again, this isn't exactly pretty, and it certainly DOES NOT remedy ALL problems, but it can help and I use this technique all the time now.  My question masters have their text elements & positioning adjusted in an attempt to make editing in the Quiz Manager a less painful experience.
 
Rob
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vjfrescas
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Re: Question slide formatting
Reply #1 - 04. Feb 2009 at 13:32
 
Hi Rob!  I posted on this in the adobe forums, btu wanted to get my issue on this board well just in case you're not checking over there...  
 
I have been working with this, and did create a question master slide.  Regardless, I'm still having trouble.  I also think the main issue is what Dave (from the adobe board) was asking:
 
"can anybody tell me exactly how the quiz function interacts with the master layout in PPT, i.e does the question map to the "title" text box and answers tot he "content" text boxes in the master layout ??"
 
Meaning, what is each quiz question looking for on the Question Master when it places the objects?  I've got the title placeholder down.  However, the question answers (T/F, MC) and the FITB questions are still getting randomly placed because I can't figure out what the Quiz Manager is looking for to place them in.  I've tried placing a text and a content placeholder but that has not worked.
 
Do you know what placeholders need to be on the Question Master for the other fields to be put in the right place?  
 
Otherwise, if I try to move them manually I get the original problem where if I need to edit anything back in the quiz manager, when I exit out everything gets jumbled around again.  It's maddening!
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Vicky Frescas
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