Simulate flash cards (question/answer cards) in Word 2003?

[Eric]

I’m using Word 2003. I’m trying to think of a creative way to use Word for an
unusual application.

I’m taking some courses to prepare for a certification exam, and I’m trying
to think of a way to use Word for “flash cards†– i.e., memorization cards.
Traditionally, flash cards are in physical form, and are simply cards with a
question printed on one side and an answer on the other.

I imagine an online version of flash cards, probably in the format of a
two-column table, where the first column has the questions and the second
column has the answers.

So far this is obviously easy. But here’s the difficulty: I’d like to hide
the answers before I’m ready to look at them. So maybe I’d click on the
question, and it becomes visible, but the answer is still hidden. Then when
I’m ready for the answer, I click on the answer, and it then becomes visible.


That’s the principle. But how this “click to view†would be implemented in
Word, I don’t really have a good idea. Alternatively, the questions and
answers could be hidden, and only become visible when I hover the mouse
pointer on top of them. That would work fine – but I don’t know any way in
Word to highlight text through a mouse hover-over.

Obviously I’d prefer to do this in a simple way, where I can add a
question/answer pair quickly and easily, rather than a lot of complicated
formatting or lengthy macro programming. (Macros would be fine, as long as
it’s not something that requires a lot of modification to add a new
question/answer pair.)

As an additional complication, some of the answers will contain graphics
images which have been copied from another document. (For example, a formula
or diagram from a slide handed out by the instructor.) Ideally, I’d like to
do the same thing with these: make them visible or invisible at will.

I’d probably settle for something less than a perfect solution, but this is
the basic problem I’m trying to solve.

Does anyone have any good ideas? (If not in Word, are there other good tools
that would do something like this?)

Thanks.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I could imagine doing this with a Userform

See the article "How to create a Userform" at:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Userforms/CreateAUserForm.htm

On the form, I would have a textbox for the question and one for the Answer
and a buttons to load the next question and to display the answer. The
questions and answers I would store in a table in a Word document, or a
spreadsheet or a database. When the Next Question button was clicked, a
routine would run that would populate the textboxes with the Question and
the Answer, setting the .Visible property of the Answer text box to false.
Clicking the Show Answer button would set the Visible property to True so
that the answer could be seen. The code in the Next Question button could
incorporate a routine so that the questions were asked in a random order
rather than in the same order all of the time.


--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Eric]

Thanks. That's a neat idea.

I'm pretty good with most aspects of Word, and I'm a former programmer too.
But I've never invested the time to learn Word VBA well. Bits and pieces,
things like auto-recording macros and then modifying them by hand sometimes.
But never really from the ground up.

Sometime between now and the time I die, I'm determined to learn VBA
well.... and read Proust, and learn statistics, and overcome my stuttering,
and master Latin and classical Greek, and live for awhile in Paris, and lose
40 pounds, and ...

Anyway, thanks.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I've been learning VBA for something like 10 years now and until a year ago,
I lived for two and half years in Paris. The latter and losing 40 pounds
are mutually exclusive.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP