How and in what program is the best place to prepare quiz game content questions.

I few friends and acquaintances would like a quiz on a particular subject of our interest. We want to collaborate on developing 5000 questions on the subject and make it available to any game developer who wants to build a game around the content. How and in what program do multiple persons from across the globe put together in 5000 questions, whether multiple choice or other, that can be easily imported to any game of unknown platform?

Our question isn't about programming the game but where to start storing the content that will make up the questions and answers for the game. Right now i was simply going to go with excel and upgrade the tab delimited export later.

Column titles: Level,Age,Question,answer,reference1,reference2,source,

If you have better ideas I would like to hear from you.



Thanks

Phil-T

Well, you can't easily load Excel, afaik - especially not on non-Windows platforms.

If you stored it in a format like XML, YAML, or JSON, it'd be easily parsable by game developers on any platform, including online websites.

Any of these formats would work - they're all created for roughly the same purpose, and all of them can even be created and edited with notepad.

You might want to still hold your data in an Excel spreadsheet for convenience, and then maybe put a button in your spreadsheet that triggers an excel script to export the data already formatted into XML or JSON. I've never done file outputting with Excel before, but having done similar stuff I can take a crack at it if you like. It'd be a fun day's diversion.

You can very well do it with Excel and export tab or semicolon delimited CSV file. Any decent programmer can convert that into a better format, like JSON/YAML or XML.

If you have PHP programmer friend, he can make a simple website and read uploaded Excel file with PHPExcel library and store it in db, as well as a button to download all questions in one YAML/JSON/XML file. However, if you go that far, a web form to add questions would make more sense.

I should've clarified that my "you can't easily load Excel" comment meant Excel spreadsheet files (.xls, .xlsx) which you have to jump through some hoops to load. CSV is usable, definitely.