Taboo on PowerPoint

The Game Room
1

I have a PowerPoint file I’d like to use for Taboo. The file has 258 slides: the first is the title slide and the second has the game instructions. (I think the number is irrelevant, as I hope to continue adding slides.) Right now, all I can do is click through from slide to slide. What I want to do is:

  • Have a third slide which is the scorecard. The scorecard should display total number of cards each team has played, total passes, total Taboo, and total score.
  • Have the slides, other than the title, instructions, and scorecard slides of course, play randomly.
  • Have a button on each slide to increase the correct team’s score if their answer is correct and a button to decrease the score for passing on a card or saying a taboo word. Perhaps three buttons on each slide for each team: correct, pass, Taboo. The buttons’ functions will not be affected by the slides being played randomly.
  • Include a timer with sound for the end of a turn.
  • Include a gong sound for reaching the agreed upon target score to win the game.
  • Instead of having the 3rd slide be the scorecard, I’d rather have the scorecard appear as a banner on each slide.

Is this doable?

2

Almost certainly. Google says you can write VBA macros in PowerPoint, which I assume works similarly to how it does in Excel, Word and Access. So in terms of whether or not it can be done, the specifications presented are trivial compared to the tools available to accomplish it.

The question then becomes: How adept are you with programming, specifically in old-school Visual Basic circa 1998?

Don’t be thrown by the word “macros.” VBA is essentially a fully functional programming language. Buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, the whole nine yards. It’s all there.

3

That’s all a very dim memory, sadly.

4

Is all programming a distant memory, or just old school Visual Basic?

Even rudimentary hobbyist programming in any language would be sufficient, not needing PowerPoint at all. Which would honestly be better; I feel like setting it up in PowerPoint with VBA would be more of a pain in the ass than writing the whole thing as a standalone app in python or whatever. Or even make every slide its own PowerPoint file, and a program randomly picks and opens one at a time.

Also, after further googling it appears that PowerPoint VBA does not include a timer control, which could make the countdown timer you describe annoying to implement.

5

It’s been years since I’ve done any kind of programming. I do have a VBA script to randomize slides, but I want to go above and beyond that.

Appreciate your attention to this issue.

6

Couldn’t you just put a timer on an object? Add a large white box that covers the text and put that on a wipe in after XX seconds with a sound played.

7

Yeah looks like it, so that is nice.

When I checked, I only looked at text results from google, not videos. All the text results I found showed VBA code using infinite loops with DoEvents inside them, which is annoying and doesn’t really work in modern Windows.

But checking again just now I watched one of the video results, and it looks like there is a timer add-in you can use. So that would work.

I really hate programming answers in the form of videos.

8

Videos seems to be too much of a trend these days. Most of my Pinterest feed now is links to videos. If I wanted videos, I’d go check Youtube.