Topdown advice sought: please suggest the best tool to use

[map_lecturer]

I am running OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows 7 (may also need to use Windows Vista home premium)

Yes I am new to the forum though a longtime, but light, user of OpenOffice Writer and Presentation.

I am a classroom teacher at a community college and know what it is like to answer the same question repeatedly. I have searched around the forums but not yet found the sort of discussion I am hoping for.

What I am hoping for is some experienced guidance on how to use Open Office to answer the following need.

I would like to store and retrieve a set of demonstration test questions for use in the classroom. The questions are multiple choice and can be classified by subject and type.* What I would like to achieve is to be able to dynamically call up a set of questions filtered in different ways, and have them presented, ideally, so they could be displayed on a projector directly to the class, or at least, so they can be copied easily to the whiteboard.

So far I have tried a few tutorials on ooBase from here:
http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm
and learned that the programming I will have to do seems quite involved.

So any advice would be appreciated. Is Base the best tool for this? If so, what are the presentation options once a query has returned results? Can a query be built dynamically from a form? Are there better tools for this applicatioin? Writer? Calc? Presentation?

In the past I have had some success presenting multiple choice questions as html files generated from a Python program. But the process is not dynamic. Would it make sense, for instance, to product html files from inside Base?

Can anyone suggest a cogent approach to solving this task?
If there is a better place to ask this, please advise.

Regards, Jim


*the questions involve city geography so the subject might be a neighbourhood, park, street, bridge. The type involves relationships, maybe: proximity, which street nearest a bridge, parallels, which street not parallel to the rest, contains, which neighbourhood contains this...and so on

[RoryOF]

There were some questions on this forum about using Impress to make flash cards, and using it to reveal answers. Use the Forum search box (top right of Forum window) to search for flash.

[map_lecturer]

Thanks, I think I found it. Concerned randomizing the slides. It does suggest the possibility of storing my questions as pictures. I had also been considering storing whole html pages.

[RPG]

Hello

My advice is start a long time search, two month, on internet to find projects who are ready to use for you. When after two month searching you did not find a project what is not good enough for then start your own project. In this two month you have a lot of new in the first place searching.

When you can use linux then you seach for openSUSE education.

When you want stay with windows then it is maybe possible to switch to KDE and I think they have some project the same as you want.

http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page
I don't know if this is what you need

Romke

[map_lecturer]

Man that is a bit discouraging. I feel that I could write something close enough to what I need using Python and a flat file in a few days. But meanwhile I have discovered 'Form-based filters' which will provide enough function to allow me to enter data into a Base table. And tonight I hope to adapt one of the tutorials at
http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm to at least dump any data I enter to a flat file if I need to take another route.

[aqualung]

Jim: Presumably you looked into this extension for Impress -- http://extensions.services.openoffice.o ... /OpenCards -- and rejected it already?

[map_lecturer]

Thank you for pointing this out! No I had not discovered it. I had shied away from Impress when there seemed to be no way to sort and filter the slides by any kind of attributes. Ans this does not, at first look, seem to answer my particular need. But I think it may have some other useful application in my classroom! I am going to look at it further.