quizquiz.co vs PowerPoint for pub quizzes

If you run your pub quiz from PowerPoint or Google Slides and it works fine, you don't need me to talk you out of it. This post is for the quizmaster who's started to notice the jobs that slides make you do by hand: clips, answer sheets, picture rounds, scoring. It covers both PowerPoint and Google Slides, because they share the same shape of problem.

The short verdict: for a simple quiz of text questions, slides are completely fine. They start to creak when you add music clips, picture rounds, printed answer sheets or a scorer's spreadsheet. That's where quizquiz.co saves you time.

The comparison at a glance

The rest of this post goes through the rows where the two differ.

Music and video clips

This is the difference that surprises people most, so I'll start here.

A music round in slides sounds easy until you want a ten second clip from the middle of a song. Microsoft's own documentation on inserting a video from YouTube or another site says online videos can't be trimmed, and that Fade, Bookmark and Trim don't apply to them. So in PowerPoint you can't tell a YouTube clip to start at 1:12 and stop after 10 seconds. You can embed the video, but you're the one watching the player and hitting pause.

Microsoft also says you must be connected to the internet for an online video to play. Worth remembering if you were picturing a deck that works anywhere.

Google Slides is no better in practice. Google's help page on adding video lists YouTube, a URL and Google Drive as sources and covers autoplay and play-on-click, but nothing on trimming a clip to a start and an end, and you can't set one in the deck either. Same job, same workaround: queue the video and watch the clock yourself.

This article is published by quizquiz.co, so this is the part where we're selling you something. You paste a YouTube link, set the start point and the clip length, and the playback controls sit in the presenter. No downloading MP3s, no trimming files in an audio editor. The full music round comparison goes into this in more depth, and our music round ideas will give you something to play once it's set up.

If your clips are local audio files you've already trimmed and embedded, a deck handles that happily. I haven't verified how desktop PowerPoint treats trimming of local files, so I'm not making a claim either way.

Answer sheets

Nobody warns you about this one.

In slides, the questions are the easy part. The answer sheet is a second document: a Word file or a second deck, laid out so teams have somewhere to write, numbered to match. Then you need the host copy with the answers. Then you reorder a round, swap a question for a fresher one, and every sheet needs updating by hand. Do that a few times and the sheets take longer than the quiz.

quizquiz.co generates the sheets from the quiz itself. Blank sheets for teams, a host copy with the answers, one click to PDF. Move a question and the sheets follow. If you run a weekly quiz, that's the job that eats your Sunday evening, and it's gone.

Picture rounds

A picture round in slides means dropping a grid of images onto a slide, resizing them so they match, keeping them aligned, numbering each one, and then building a matching answer sheet with the same numbering. It's fiddly and it's slow, and if you change one image you check the whole grid again.

quizquiz.co does grid layouts for you. You upload the images, pick a layout, and control what appears on the big screen versus on the answer sheet. If you're stuck for themes, our picture round ideas has plenty.

Presenter view

I want to be fair here, because PowerPoint's presenter view is good.

Microsoft documents Presenter View as showing the current slide, the next slide, your speaker notes, a slide timer and the time, with draw, zoom and jump-to-slide tools. Google Slides has a presenter view with speaker notes too. Put your answers in the notes and you've got a perfectly decent host screen.

quizquiz.co has a host view on the laptop while the big screen shows the quiz, and it shows what's coming next and the answers. So on that front it's roughly level with what you already have. Don't switch for that.

The real difference is the phone remote. You scan a QR code and drive the quiz from your phone, media included, so you can walk the room, read the question near the back tables, start a music clip and move on without going back to the laptop. In a long, narrow pub that matters. In a village hall with a clicker, it may not.

Marking and scores

Slides don't mark anything. They don't try to. You collect the sheets, mark them by hand, or recruit a scorer who runs a spreadsheet and gets the sums wrong after the third pint.

On quizquiz.co you choose per quiz whether players answer on paper or on phones. On phones, each team scans a QR code on the big screen, picks a team name, and answers are marked automatically. You can override any mark, and there's a live leaderboard on the big screen. Or stay on paper and mark by hand exactly as you do now. Nothing forces the phones on you, and plenty of pubs would rather keep them away from the tables. Our guide to running a great pub quiz covers that trade-off.

Cost

PowerPoint isn't expensive, and I don't want to imply it is. Microsoft's own support page says you can view and edit a presentation for free in a web browser with a Microsoft account. If you want the desktop app, Microsoft 365 Personal was $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year on the US store when I checked in October 2026. Prices move and vary by country, so check the page yourself.

Google Slides is widely used for free. I couldn't find an official Google page that states its terms, so I'll leave it at that.

quizquiz.co is free to run quiz nights. The site says presenting, answer sheets, the phone remote and team play won't be paywalled. The free plan's real limits are 3 saved quizzes and 20 AI-generated questions applied to your quizzes. Pro lifts those and removes the quizquiz.co branding from slides and handouts, and the current prices are on the pricing page. If you save a lot of quizzes, you'll hit that 3-quiz limit, and a folder of .pptx files won't ever ask you to upgrade.

When PowerPoint or Google Slides is the better choice

Here's where I'd tell a friend to stay with slides.

You have no reliable internet. A deck on a laptop plays with no connection at all, images and audio included. quizquiz.co will keep showing the slides it has already loaded if the wifi drops, but the YouTube clips won't play, images it hasn't fetched won't appear, and the phone remote and any team phones will drop off. If your venue is a village hall with no signal and a router that's been off since March, that settles it. (An embedded YouTube clip has the same problem in PowerPoint, so a deck only helps if your media is local.)

You want total layout freedom. Anything you can imagine, you can build in slides. A themed round with a custom board, an animated reveal, a format no quiz tool supports. quizquiz.co gives you slide types and themes, and they're decent, but they're a fixed set. If you enjoy designing the show as much as running it, a blank slide is a better canvas.

You already know it, and so does your cover. You've refined your deck over years. Your co-host can open a .pptx file and run it when you're ill, without learning anything new or making an account. That portability is real. A file can be handed to anyone.

You want to own the file for good. No account, no service that might change its pricing or disappear. quizquiz.co is a small independent project, and that's a fair thing to weigh. A .pptx on your own drive will outlive all of us.

Your quiz is simple. A round of text questions, an answer read-out, paper sheets someone already has a template for. Slides do that perfectly well, and "more features" isn't a reason to change a routine that works.

If that list describes you, close this tab with a clear conscience.

Where moving makes sense

If the pain is specific, the fix can be too. Clip rounds that need a start time, answer sheets you rebuild weekly, picture grids you nudge into line for an hour, a scorer you can't keep: those are the jobs quizquiz.co was built for.

You don't have to move everything. Plenty of people keep a deck for the odd themed special and use a quiz tool for the weekly one. You can try the quiz maker without an account, paste in a round from your existing deck, and see whether the sheets alone are worth it. If you're about to build the next quiz anyway, the common hosting mistakes are worth a skim first, whatever tool you pick.