Just for speculation: how hard do you think it would be / massivity of a coding job to create spaced repetition for...Word?
So that, if you had 900 pages you could get them thrown at you randomly and then to disappear and pop up again days later based on some sort of response:
Easy - Medium - Difficult
I've got some LOVELY pages I've built. Set all to about 4 x 6 size.
I prefer to use Word because it is easy to edit.
But, them being all in sequence allows me to cheat - like learning the lyrics to a song.
I know there are some "export" programs for popular flashcards - quizlet / memrise and many others.
But, once the content is on that platform it can be hard to edit.
So, I guess my question is two-fold: is there anything ALREADY out there that can let me keep these pages in Word and see them as flashcards?
But, more to the point - in your technical opinion, in terms of coding - what kind of a job would that be for an add-on for word?
For what it's worth all the card right now are in pairs. Something like.
1: H2SO4
2: Sulfuric acid
3: 1653-1658
4: Oliver Cromwell
5:This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
6: This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Sincerely,
OT
The VBA code could not only do a random selection (think about a shuffle algorithm) of slides, but could also add some filtering if there is data in the slide deck on which to base filtering actions. For example, if you have slides in different categories like History, Geography, Math, Vocabulary, Current Events, Trivia, etc. you could select which categories to include in your deck. You might also categorized each slide as to grade level, and then you could filter <=7 for grade schoolers or >=13 for just the toughest questions. You would have to invest more time in your VBA code to filter and sort, as this isn't built into PowerPoint.
Ideally, it would be easiest to filter on something like (just) the title of each slide. My concern is that I couldn't find an easy way to flexibly categorize the slides. I thought of using slide tags, but I don't think you can assign them from the editor; you need to use VBA or write some code to add, display and maintain them - not very user friendly. Also, I don't know if tags assigned using VBA are persistent (i.e. will be saved with the .ppt file) or transient (i.e. will only be assigned as long as the file is open; or worse, as long as the VBA code is running.)
As a second idea, I tried using one or more fields below the bottom of the slide, like these two fields:
Category: History
Grade: 5
By having them below the slide they won't display when you show the slide, but they are easy to see and edit when you maintain the slide. You can even add them to your template. However, it would take a bit of coding to get at these fields, which I am calling Classifications. You would write a function like
GetClassification(strClassificationType as String) as String
and
GetClassification("Grade") would return "5" in the above example (you would convert this to a number for filtering purposes).
Finally, using Zoom / Categories might work, but that gives you the equivalent of just one tag, I think.
My experience with PowerPoint is limited. If this interests you please so indicate and perhaps another expert will jump in and elaborate some ways you could classify your slides.