I teach English as a foreign language and would like to use flash cards with "cloze" sentences (sentences with key words missing) to help my students learn their phrasal verbs.

For example, to help them learn the phrasal verb "take on" I might give them a flash card with this "cloze" sentence on one side of the card:

The school offered him a great opportunity but he _____ the project __ knowing far too little about VBA.
and the answer on the other side of the card:

The school offered him a great opportunity but he took the project on knowing far too little about VBA.

While this is actually not a great cloze sentence, it does illustrate what I need to accomplish and also nicely describes my predicament. I have had a fair amount of experience programming but that was long, long ago (Cobol, basic, etc) and I know little about VBA. I'm still comfortable writing programs, however, and was hoping someone on this forum could give me some suggestions/tips.

At the moment my not-yet-clozed sentences are stored in a word document in the second column of a table, and I have already highlighted the words I would like "clozed" in yellow, eg:

The school offered him a great opportunity but he took the project on knowing far too little about VBA.

Note: As you will notice, I have used a red font to indicate where, in Word, I have highlighted the text yellow. This is because I unfortunately can't figure out how to highlight text yellow on this message board!

My thinking was to add two empty columns to the table and then write a macro that would do the following:

1) For each element in the table, copy the text in the 2nd Column to the 3rd Column.

2) Search the text in the 3rd Column, finding any and all words that are highlighted yellow and surrounding them with the html code necessary to produce a yellow highlight. The text in the 3rd column would end up looking something like this (I don't know very much about html either):

The school offered him a great opportunity but he <span style="color:#ffff00;">took</span> the project <span style="color:#ffff00;">on</span> knowing far too little about VBA.

3) Copy the text in the 3rd Column to the 4th column, this time finding any and all words that are highlighted yellow and replacing each non-space character with an underscore. The text in the 4th column would end up looking something like this:

The school offered him a great opportunity but he <span style="color:#ffff00;">____</span> the project <span style="color:#ffff00;">__</span> knowing far too little about VBA.

After this I could convert the table to text, save the file as *.txt and transfer it to my flash card program.

Any suggestions you might have to actually code this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Trip