From Word Doc to Game Night in Seconds
Every week before trivia night, the same ritual: copy questions out of a Word doc, paste them one by one into PowerPoint, fiddle with fonts, forget to update the date. It works — but it takes an hour you don’t have. For those of you with regulars who are hard of hearing having a slide deck is a must.
So I built a tool to fix that.
Trivia Presentation Creator [Download Here] takes a plain-text questions file and turns it into a fully-formatted PowerPoint in seconds. No manual formatting. No copy-paste. Just drop the file in and go.
How it works
The questions file is plain text file. Simply copy the question rows from the weekly triva doc we use and paste it into a .txt file (this removes all the microsoft formatting garbage). You should have numbers before each regular question. DO NOT SELECT THE ANSWERS WHEN COPYING, QUESTIONS ONLY.
The zip contains an example queesitons.txt file. You can see the quesiton number, the category and the question are listed plus some of my reminder rows for audio bonuses and announcing current scores. If you’re pasted version is missing some of these elements it may not work. If oyu are having trouble feel free to send me your question file via email and I’ll trry and debug it and release a new version of the tool.
The parser handles the quirks you’d expect from real-world trivia files: multi-line questions, special rounds like FINAL and TIE-BREAKER, audio bonus reminder slides, and lines that just need to be ignored.
Once parsed, python-pptx does the heavy lifting — generating a title slide with your logo and tonight’s date, then a slide per question with consistent styling, colors, and layout.
The whole thing is about 500 lines of Python across four files.
The GUI
The CLI works great for a power nerd like me, but not everyone is a developer. So I wrapped it in a small tkinter drag-and-drop window. Drop the .txt file onto the app, optionally type the venue name, and it spins for a few seconds before dropping a trivia-2026-06-03.pptx right next to the executable.
PyInstaller bundles the whole thing — Python runtime, dependencies, everything — into a single 36MB .exe. No install required. No viruses, promise ;).
Stack
- Python 3.12
- python-pptx — slide generation
- tkinterdnd2 — drag-and-drop support
PyInstaller— single-file executable packaging
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