Advice for creating and scoring quizzes

Question

I'm not sure where to actually post this (I'm pretty sure someone will chastize me tell me where after of course voting me down - expected).

I've been developing a bunch of files for Safety Training at my facility. The UI is built in Excel with Excel VBA at it's heart to get names and the Training program to run. The Excel file opens A PowerPoint presentation after getting your name and the program you desire and logs that data. When you are done with the presentation it opens as a Word doc - the quiz for that presentation.

My issue is this: currently all of our tests are created in Word (I barely know Word VBA) and would like to continue by just adding some text boxes and check boxes for the answers. I'd like to add some code to facilitate the automatic scoring of these tests by placing a button at the end that "locks" the test (so they can't change answers) then checks and returns the test score.

I don't see where Word Files can be locked as in Excel's "Protect Sheet". The scoring I am using seems to be flawed but that is an issue I can work out later if I stay with Word. I am wondering if it wouldn't be better and maybe easier to do this in Excel as it is set up more for evaluating data input.

Looking for any advice on what others might do if they had a choice to use Word or Excel for creating tests. I currently have no preference (except for the above - which I am not locked into) in which format to use, possibly even using a separate PowerPoint Presentation as the test itself.

Answer 1

To try to answer the question: What you are doing seems like a lot of fun from a VBA perspective, and from a user interface perspective, but it seems to me your intuition is telling you to move the test to excel and I think that is the right thing to do. You have much more ability to lock down the test, could easily score multiple tests and create a multi-test curve, etc, etc.