Four Easy Ways to Boost Your Productivity in Articulate Quizmaker

Suppose you’ve just delivered a dazzling e-learning course to your client, and they tack on an 11th-hour request: “Can you whip up an Articulate Quizmaker quiz too? Oh, and can you do it by this afternoon?”

Not to worry—just bust out some simple Quizmaker productivity tricks and you’ll be building that quiz in record time. Here are four easy time-savers to speed your development cycle for quizzes and surveys.

Use question defaults to streamline your preferences

If you need to build several questions that behave similarly, you can save yourself a lot of clicking by using Quizmaker’s question defaults. For example, say you want to create 50 questions, each worth 5 points, and the answer choices need to be shuffled. Let’s also say you want to allow unlimited attempts on all questions, and you need to use some standard feedback text authored by your corporate training folks. Setting all those preferences one question at a time could take nearly half a minute per question—that’s almost 21 mind-numbing minutes of needless clicking!

Instead, before you build your questions, just click Quiz Properties and select Question Defaults. Set your preferences once, and Quizmaker will apply them to all new questions you add.

Lots of questions of the same type? Duplicate & customize

Here’s another way to streamline: if you need to build several variations of the same question type—for example, suppose you want to create a randomized pool of 100 multiple choice questions, all with the same settings—just build the first question, then duplicate and customize for as many questions as you need.

Duplicating is easy: from the question list, right-click any line and choose Duplicate Question. Then just tweak the text and swap out any visual elements. All other question settings stay intact!

Rearrange answer choices on the fly

If you decide you want a question’s answer choices to appear in a different order than what you originally entered, you don’t have to fuss with retyping answers in Form View, or rearranging text boxes in Slide View.

Instead, just open the question in Form View and click the letter to the left of any answer choice. This selects the entire line. Now you can drag it to a new spot in the list of choices. Release your mouse, and the choice drops into its new place.

Use keyboard shortcuts for faster quiz development

A simple keyboard shortcut can trim as much as a second or two from your workflow each time you use it—which might not sound like much, but those seconds really add up for frequent tasks, such as previewing your quiz. Here are some common Quizmaker ‘09 keyboard shortcuts that are worth knowing:

And for all of you keyboard shortcut junkies, this article lists several more hot keys available in Slide View for editing slide objects.

Have more Quizmaker shortcuts and tips to share? Shout ’em out to your virtual colleagues in the Articulate Quizmaker forum at E-Learning Heroes, so your fellow community members can take advantage too!