Helpful Tips for Matching Quizmaker and Engage to your PPT Theme

Mar 11, 2011

I've only been working in the Articulate suite for about two weeks now (though I've been an instructional designer for about 3 years), and I love all the helpful tips I've found in the Articulate community. So today when I figured out an easy way to make quizmaker quizes match the look of my presenter slides... I thought I would share in case anyone else might find it helpful.

The PowerPoint Master slide set I'm using is one that I custom created using a marketing photo from my company and some shaded bars of color. I wanted the quizmaker quizzes to have as close to the same look as possible. What I ended up doing was saving one of my slides as a jpeg (with a few minor tweaks to make up for the squishing that quizmaker does to photos) and importing the entire slide as my quizmaker background. Then it was easy to just create a quiz master slide and adjust the question and answers to fit on the page correctly.

This got me thinking - I'm sure people with more experience than I have are sure to have loads of tips for customizing quizmaker and engage themes/colors to match the look of their presenter slides. So why don't we all share?

Here's the template I was working with - though the other slides show a lot more of the photo in the background.

10 Replies
Jeanette Brooks

Hi Sarah - I love the look of your template!   Thanks for sharing your approach, and for starting the thread!

One trick that I sometimes use to make things look consistent is to get rid of the frame and title on my quiz, and use the PowerPoint slide master instead, so that the headings throughout my course & quiz look the same. In the example below, see how the red heading text on the quiz matches the heading styles on the content slide? To do this, you just make a slide master with your heading text and then leverage that slide master behind your quiz slide. And of course you'd want to remove the default Quizmaker title by opening the quiz and going to Player Templates > Layout and unmarking "Display quiz title." I usually remove the question list navigation panel too, just to keep that whole area at the top of the slide nice and clean.

Sarah Newman

I love the idea of removing the navigation panel at the top of the slide, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do that. When I uncheck the box, it still leaves the frame and just takes away the text. Would you mind to walk me through the steps?

Jeanette Brooks said:

 I usually remove the question list navigation panel too, just to keep that whole area at the top of the slide nice and clean.

Pete Sheppard

Hi, I really like this idea and am trying to do it too. I've created my Slide Master and now I have the background in all my slides, and the titles are automatically generating for nearly all the slides as I've used a title text placeholder for the Master Slide. The only slides the title won't generate for are the quizmaker ones. The background image shows up fine, but no title! Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Also, related to the fact that I'm trying to get a uniform look and feel across all my slides, including Quizmaker slides, I was wondering - is there any way of removing the Quizmaker buttons, particularly the Next button, as I'd rather the learner just continued to use the Articulate Player buttons?

Pete Sheppard

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the feedback on the Next button - that's what I thought to be honest but I just wanted to be sure about it.

As for making the presentation look more seamless, in fact I had been using those resources, and also this one, as linked above by Jeanette. http://community.articulate.com/tutorials/products/making-your-quiz-look-seamless-with-your-presenter-project.aspx

My problem is that though I think I'm doing everything Jeanette is describing above, where she explains how she made the red heading text of the quizzes match the presenter slides by leveraging a slide master with a title behind the quiz template, the text is not showing up for me. The rest of the slide master is showing, however. Is this a bug, or am I missing a step?

Jeanette Brooks

Hey Pete - it's possible that PowerPoint is "losing" the slide master after you apply it. Sometimes this happens inexplicably... in PowerPoint, try re-applying the slide master by right-clicking on the slide thumbnail and choose Layout, then choose the master you want to use. But definitely if you keep having trouble though, let us know!

Katie Nelson

I created a custom color scheme for my presentation in powerpoint.  I want to use the same colors in quizmaker.  Is there anyway to import or get access to the color theme I created in the powerpoint  file for quizmaker or do I have to build it again in quizmaker?  I have done serveral seraches and got lots of good hints for everything else but could find nothing for this specific question.  I will probably have the same question for engage. Thanks.

Peter Anderson

Hi Katie!

First you'll need to determine the hexadecimal values for your color scheme. You can do that through the Player Template Builder in Presenter or through a third-party tool. Check out this great article for further instructions and let us know if that's what you're looking for:

http://www.articulate.com/blog/articulate-101-how-to-create-a-consistent-look-with-presenter-engage/

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