On a Scale of 1 to 100 - How Difficult to Add Spaced Repetition Add-on to Word

aikimark is proposing that you store the flashcards in a "master" deck and then use VBA to create one or more copies of the deck with the slides in random order. Since VBA often triggers virus concerns, one advantage of his suggestion is that you can distribute the random deck without any VBA code in it. Another advantage is there are probably more options to export the deck, for example to be displayed on a website. The disadvantage is that the cards in the copy will again have a "frozen" order, albeit a new one. You will have to keep creating new decks to get new random orders.

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.

Thanks, ALL! :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))!!!