PDF to flashcards
Everyone agrees flashcards work. Almost nobody makes them.
The reason is boring and completely understandable. Making a deck for one lecture takes about forty minutes of retyping things you already have in a file. It's dull, it feels like admin rather than studying, and by the time you've done it you're out of energy for the part that actually helps, which is reviewing the cards.
So the deck never gets made, and you reread your notes instead, which doesn't work.
What this does
Upload a PDF, a slide deck, or a Word file. You get a deck of question-and-answer cards written from what's actually in it.
You pick the size when you start: 10, 20, 30 or 50 cards. Smaller decks for a single lecture, bigger ones for a full topic before an exam. You can add more later if the deck feels thin, up to 50.
You don't need to make a video first. Upload the file, go straight to the cards.
What studying them looks like
Every card sits in one of three buckets: new, learning, or mastered. Cards move based on how you answer, and the deck shows you what's where, so you always know how much is left rather than guessing.
You can also:
- Star the ones that keep catching you out and drill only those
- Shuffle, or flip which side shows first if you want to go definition to term
- Edit any card if the wording is off or the answer is incomplete
- Reset and start the deck over before an exam
You can take the deck with you
This matters more than it sounds, so it's worth being clear about.
You can export to Anki as a CSV, or copy the deck straight into Quizlet. You can also just print it.
If Anki is already your system, use Anki. Its scheduling is better than ours and better than everyone's, because that's the entire product and it has been for fifteen years. The part worth borrowing from us is the writing, which is the part that stops people. Generate the deck here, export it, review it there.
Tools that trap your cards are hoping you'll stay out of inconvenience. That's a bad reason for you to stay.
Where generated cards go wrong
Worth knowing before you trust a deck with an exam.
Definitions come out great. Reasoning comes out shallow. Generating "what is X" from a document is easy, so that's what you get a lot of. If every card in your deck is a definition and your exam asks you to compare two things or apply a method, you're drilling the wrong skill. Read the deck before you rely on it.
Output quality tracks input quality. A slide that says "Krebs cycle" and nothing else produces a card that says "Krebs cycle" and nothing else. Dense notes make good cards. Thin notes make thin cards. There's no way around that.
It can be wrong. Not often, but it happens, and a card you learned wrong is worse than no card. That's why editing is there. Skim the deck once before you start.
What the file needs to be
PDF, PowerPoint, or Word. The text has to be real text, meaning you can select it with your cursor. A scanned page or a photo of your notebook is an image, and there's nothing in it to read yet.
The catch
You need an account. Free tier covers five deck generations, which is enough to do a few real lectures and see whether the cards are any good for your subject.
Editing a deck you already made doesn't count against that, and neither does adding cards to one. Only making a new deck does.
What else you get from the same file
- A practice quiz with four question types, graded as you answer
- A one-page study sheet with key terms, common mistakes and questions
- A video lesson explaining the topic, if the material is something you don't understand yet rather than something you need to memorise
If you understand it and need to remember it, stay on the cards. That's what they're for.