The notebook is A5, spiral-bound, and has a pint ring on the cover from last month. Inside, in biro, Round 3 reads: “Geography. 1. Capital of Australia (NOT Sydney). 2. Longest river in the UK. 3. Which country has the most islands?? check. 4. Mount Kilimanjaro, which country.” Question three has two question marks and a circled “check” next to it, which tells you everything about how pub quizzes get written: on the bus, over several evenings, with a note to verify things later that sometimes never happens.
For years the host at a quiz night read all of that out from the notebook, and teams wrote answers on a marking sheet while someone at the back shouted “Can you repeat number four?” Plenty of pubs still do it that way. But more and more of them have a big TV on the wall, usually showing the football with the sound off, and a laptop behind the bar that can be plugged into it. Putting the questions on screen cuts the repeats, helps anyone hard of hearing, and makes the picture round far easier than passing round photocopies with beer on them.
The catch is turning the notebook into slides. Sixty questions, six rounds, answers, a picture round and a tie-break comes to somewhere north of eighty slides, and typing those into PowerPoint by hand takes a whole evening you could have spent writing better questions.
How a quiz deck should be laid out
Get the structure right before you touch any software. A pub quiz deck has a rhythm that teams pick up within a round, and breaking it confuses people who have had three pints.
- A title slide for each round. “Round 3: Geography” in big letters. This gives the room a moment to settle and lets the host take a sip.
- One question per slide. Never two. Teams need the question on screen while they argue about it, and a slide with five questions on it turns into an eye test from the back table.
- Answers as their own slides, after the round. Once the marking sheets are swapped, run through the answers one per slide, in the same order as the questions.
- The picture round as images. One image per slide, numbered large, or a grid of six if you want teams to work on them during the break.
- A tie-break slide. A single numerical question, closest answer wins, kept back until you need it.
The third point trips people up. In PowerPoint you might normally put the question and answer on the same slide and make the answer appear on a click. The tool I use for this does not do animations or click-to-reveal effects, so the answer has to live on a separate slide. Separate answer slides also stop the classic disaster where someone clicks once too many during the round and the whole pub sees the answer to question seven.
Building it in Quillbot
Quillbot’s ai presentation maker handles the boring part well: you paste in text, tell it what format you want, and it builds slides with titles and short text that you then edit. It is labelled Beta, it is free to use, and a Premium plan adds unlimited presentations and faster generation. For a monthly quiz the free version is a sensible place to start.
Here is how I put one round together.
- Type the round out cleanly. Copy the notebook page into a document or straight into the prompt box: question number, question, and the answer on the same line in brackets. Do this one round at a time. Six rounds in one go is asking for jumbled answers.
- Write a prompt that names the format. Say it is a pub quiz, say you want one question per slide, and say the answers go on separate slides after the questions. Be explicit, because “make a quiz presentation” will get you something that looks like a classroom revision deck.
- Set the slide count. The tool has a slide-count selector. Ten questions plus ten answers plus a title slide is twenty-one, so set it to that and count the result.
- Pick a theme and edit. It offers AI-generated layouts, themes and design options. Pick something with large, high-contrast text, because the pub TV will be fifteen feet from the nearest table. Then go through every slide, editing titles and text, reordering anything that came out of sequence, and deleting the odd slide it adds on its own.
- Attach the picture-round images. Through “Attach Files” it takes PNG, JPG, JPEG and WebP images, plus PDF, Word and PowerPoint documents. You can crop images, remove backgrounds and apply filters, which is useful when you want to cut a famous face out of a busy background.
- Export twice. Export a PPTX for the pub laptop and a PDF as a backup on a USB stick or your phone. The PDF has saved me once already, when the laptop behind the bar decided it no longer liked PowerPoint ten minutes before kick-off.
If the pub’s laptop runs Google Slides, export the PPTX and upload it. Direct Google Slides export is listed as coming soon.
The prompt
This is the prompt I would use for a single general knowledge round. Change the questions, keep the instructions.
Make a pub quiz round presentation. Format: one title slide reading “Round 2: General Knowledge”, then ten question slides with one question per slide, numbered 1 to 10 in large text, then a slide reading “Round 2: Answers”, then ten answer slides in the same order, each showing the question number, the question in smaller text and the answer in large text. Keep text big and readable from across a pub. No extra slides, no summary slide, no images unless I attach them. Questions and answers: 1. Which planet is known as the Red Planet? (Mars) 2. How many players are on a netball team on court? (Seven) 3. In which year did the Channel Tunnel open? (1994) 4. What is the chemical symbol for gold? (Au) …
The line “no extra slides, no summary slide” is there because without it you may get a closing slide thanking everyone for coming, which is fine, but also a slide summarising the round, which gives away every answer.
A notebook page, before and after
The raw material, straight from the notebook:
R4 music Q3 – which band, Wonderwall, 1995?? (Oasis) – maybe play intro instead? no, can’t do audio on TV. keep as text
The question slide, after one round of editing:
Round 4: Music Question 3 Which Manchester band released “Wonderwall” in 1995?
And its answer slide, three slides after the last question of the round:
Question 3 Which Manchester band released “Wonderwall” in 1995? Oasis
Two things changed. “Manchester” went in as a fair nudge so the question has one clear answer, and the note to self about audio disappeared, which matters, because the tool will sometimes carry your scribbled asides onto a slide if you paste them in. Delete your notes to self before you paste, or read every slide before the night.
The music round brings up a real limit. The deck cannot play audio clips, so a “name that intro” round needs a separate speaker and a playlist. The slides can still show “Track 1”, “Track 2” and so on, so teams know which number they are on.
The picture round
Teams love it and hosts dread it, mostly because of the printing. With a screen, you can skip most of that.
Collect your images first, and only use ones you have the right to show: your own photos, images you have made, or pictures from sources that allow reuse. Save them with numbered file names (pic01, pic02 and so on) so they go in the order you intend. Attach them in one go and tell the tool, in the prompt, that each image gets its own slide with a large number in the corner and no caption, because a helpful caption naming the celebrity rather defeats the point.
Cropping does a lot here. A close crop of a famous building, a logo with the name cut off, or a face with the background removed using the tool’s background removal all make for harder, better questions than the full picture. Apply a filter if you want to make a well-known image less instantly recognisable, though go easy, since a round that nobody scores on is no fun either.
Then build a grid version as well: all ten images on one slide, numbered. Leave it up on the TV during the break while people queue at the bar, and run the one-per-slide version when you go through the answers.
Rounds and how many slides each needs
| Round type | Slides needed | Tip |
|---|---|---|
| Standard 10-question round | 22 (title, 10 questions, answers title, 10 answers) | Generate one round per prompt so answers stay in order |
| Picture round | 2 to 12, depending on one image per slide or a grid | Hand out a printed sheet too, for the table that cannot see the TV |
| Music round | 12 to 22 | Slides show track numbers only; audio comes from a separate speaker |
| Tie-break | 2 (question, then answer) | Use a number nobody can know exactly, such as the height of a well-known building in metres |
For the tie-break, pick a question with a single, checkable number for an answer, and check it twice, because two teams standing at the bar arguing about the answer is the worst possible end to the night.
Check every answer yourself
This is the section to read twice.
An AI tool will happily generate quiz questions if you ask. It will also, now and then, generate a wrong answer with total confidence and lay it out on a lovely slide in large bold text. It may get a date a year out, mix up two similar-sounding films, or give an outdated answer to a “largest” or “most” question, and those are exactly the questions pub quizzers love to dispute.
So the rule for quiz nights is simple. Write the questions and answers yourself, then use the tool only to lay them out. If you do ask it to suggest questions, treat every one as unverified until you have checked it against a reliable reference, and if you cannot check it, cut it. Pay extra attention to any question that relies on a “most”, “first”, “largest” or “only”, because these are the ones where the accepted answer changes or depends on how you count. That circled “check” on question three in the notebook, the one about islands, is a good example: different sources count islands differently, and a team with a phone in the toilets will find the one that disagrees with you.
Check the answers again after generation, too. Even if you typed them correctly, the tool may rephrase a question in a way that changes the answer, and a slide that says “Which country has the most islands?” now needs an answer you can defend.
Mistakes hosts make
Putting the answers on the question slides. No click-to-reveal means everyone sees it. Separate slides, always.
Generating all six rounds at once. The answers drift out of order. One round per prompt.
Tiny text. A slide that looks fine on your laptop is unreadable on the pub TV from the back. Make the question text bigger than feels sensible.
No backup. Bring the PDF on a USB stick and your phone. Pub laptops are a law unto themselves.
Forgetting the marking sheet. The slides do not replace paper. Print a sheet with numbered spaces for each round, plus the picture round grid, and a box for the team name, which will inevitably be a pun.
Skipping the dry run. Plug the laptop into the pub TV an hour early and click through every slide. An image that looks well cropped on your screen can lose its edges on an old telly, and you want to find that out before the first team arrives.
Trusting a generated fact without looking it up. See above. Every time.
A few things hosts ask
Can I edit the deck with my co-host? Yes. Quillbot’s ai presentation maker lets you invite someone by email or send a shared link, so whoever is writing the sport round can drop their questions in without emailing a document back and forth.
Can it add the music clips or a countdown timer? No. It does not add animations, transitions or audio, and it does not write speaker notes. Run music from a separate device and keep the countdown on your phone.
Does it read questions straight from a photo of my notebook? It accepts images, but handwriting in biro on a crumpled page is a lot to ask. Typing the round takes ten minutes and saves corrections later.
What if the pub laptop does not have PowerPoint? Open the PDF. It works almost anywhere and keeps the layout exactly as you made it, though you lose the ability to edit on the night.
Before Thursday
Take your next round out of the notebook tonight, type the ten questions with answers in brackets, and look each answer up once more before it goes anywhere near a slide. The deck can wait; the wrong answer about islands cannot.
