User Guide

Writing questions into the spreadsheet

When writing questions several important things must be considered, as the program still is quite buggy and likely to crash, when unexpected input is reached.

Question-type agnostic fields

For all of the qustion types the following fields must/may be included in the spreadsheet

  • number: mandatory The number of the question

  • type: mandatory any of NFM, NF, MC

  • name: mandatory the internal name of the question, not the title that will be seen when the question is viewed

  • text: mandatory, the question text. At least one this must be filled out. If it occures more than once, a new paragraph gets added for each.

  • picture: optional if left empty, no picture will be included

    • All pictures have to be in the folder Abbildungen_SVG/KAT_XX in the same dir as the spreadsheet

    • if a picture should be include, 1 (like true) should be written here.

    • If a picture from another Question should be used, write:

      • 1=ID where ID is the number of the question that the picture should be used from.

Creating valid questions of Type NFM

The following fields must be filled out additionally to the type-agnostic ones:

  • bulletPoints: mandatory list of bullet points seperated by ;, each bullet Points consist of 4 parts:

    1. Name: (Example: length)

    2. Variable Name: (Example l )

    3. =-Sign

    4. Variable: (Example {l}): must be one letter enclosed by curly braces

    5. Si-Unit: (Example m)

  • result: mandatory formula to calculate the result. Must follow those rules.

    • Decimal separator must be a . dot.

    • Variables must not be encapsulated by {curly} braces.

    • Example: 3.7*a/(b+4*c)-a**2/4 is a valid formula

  • tolerance: mandatory as fraction

  • unit: optional, 'not yet implemented'

  • firstResult: optional but recommended to verify the formula inside result with the equation-checker tool.

Generating questions from the spreadsheet

To generate the Questions, the spreadsheet must be filled according to the example spreadsheet. If not the creation of the XML-Files will throw some errors.

  1. Open the excel2moodle Programm by executing py -m excel2moodle on the command line (py works on windows, for unix based systems it would be python or python3)

  2. Select the spreadsheet by clicking on the select spreadsheet button.

Now all Questions are created and should be shown in the Question List, sorted into their categories

Creating an exam question selection

An exam most often will not include all questions present in the spreadsheet. Therefore only a selection of questions can be made with excel2moodle. The selection can be exported to a single .xml file, which then may be uploaded to moodle

Create an exam File:

  1. click on every questions that should be included in the exam

  2. check, if the total number of points and questions is as desired

  3. Configure the export Settings to your liking. Possible is:

    • Whether or not the questions should be categorized

    • If for every NFM question the same variant should be used

    • If yes, which variant this should be

  4. Export the selected questions by clicking on export selected questions to examfile

  5. You will be promted to specify the export location

Now a little overview is shown with the selected questions. If clicking OK those questions will be exported into the file specified at step 3

Using the extra modules from the Tools section

Some functionality is separated from the main use-case, hence it lives outside the core subpackage inside the extra subpackage. Those functionality can be used either via cmd through the excel2moodle.extra subpackage and run as scripts, or it is accessible under the Tools section via the main window taskbar.

How to use the extra scripts or the tools counterpart is documented in the source-code documentation excel2moodle.extra package

Available extra functionality

  • Equation verification script and UI-tool