Getting started with Bingo Creator

Here’s how to go from a blank slide to a finished set of bingo cards. If you haven’t loaded and registered the add-in yet, do that first on the install page.

Make your first bingo set

We’ll build a 5x5 card, but any size works. 3x3, 4x4, 7x5, and others are all supported.

1. Create a new PowerPoint presentation.
2. On the Add-ins tab, in the Bingo Creator section, click Insert Bingo Template.
3. Enter the dimensions you want, such as 5x5, then click OK. Bingo Creator draws a table of exactly that size on the slide.
4. Fill each cell with a word, image, or shape. Whatever you put in a cell becomes one bingo card item. A 5x5 card uses 24 items plus the free space, so add at least 24 items, and more if you want variety from card to card.
5. Click Generate Bingo Cards.
6. Enter the number of pages you want.
7. Confirm, and Bingo Creator shuffles your items and creates that many unique cards.

Note

Bingo Creator needs exactly one table on the slide to use as the main bingo card table. It reads whatever is in that table’s cells as your pool of items.

Put images and shapes in cells

Everything inside a single cell is treated as one bingo item and shuffled together as a unit. So a cell with an image in the center and a caption underneath moves around the card as that whole combination. Image and text stay together.

One thing to watch: keep every picture, including its transparent bounds, fully inside its cell. An image that overhangs the cell edge can come out empty or in the wrong place. A shape or image that deliberately overlaps two cells is treated as static decoration. It stays put and is left out of the shuffle, which you can use on purpose for borders and headers.

Keep a free space and a title row

When you click Generate Bingo Cards, the Advanced tab has options for common card layouts:

• Keep the center as the Free Space: leaves the middle cell untouched on every card.
• Top row in table contains the title and should not be shuffled: pins your header row in place while the rest shuffles.

Add more items than the grid holds

Sometimes you want more variety than the grid has cells, for example a 5x5 card (25 cells) but a pool of 40 items to shuffle from. Use an additional table for the extra items.

1. Open Quick Insert → Additional Table tab.
2. Click Insert Additional Table.
3. Fill it with your extra bingo items.

Those extra items get shuffled into the mix, but the additional table itself isn’t shown in the final generated cards. It’s only a source of items.

Speed up a slow generation

If a large set takes a long time to generate: when you click Generate Bingo Cards, open Advanced Options and make sure The text in each cell in the table is uniquely formatted and should keep its style is unchecked. This copies the text but not the per-cell formatting (font, color, and so on) into each card, which speeds generation up dramatically.

Related videos

• Create Christmas Bingo Cards in PowerPoint
• How to create an Adventure Bingo Card set in PowerPoint

If cards come out with empty cells or items that don’t move, see the FAQ & fixes.