Turn PowerPoint slides into flashcards

Upload the .pptx file here. GeniusPal reads the slide text and writes a deck of cards from it, with no add-in to install and nothing to copy out of the deck by hand. It works through the whole file rather than the opening slides, turning the definitions, lists, and distinctions your lecturer put on screen into question-and-answer pairs. Lecture decks are the best possible source for a study deck because they are already a filtered list of what the person setting your exam thinks matters, so the cards land on the same material the paper will. You can drop the file in before signing in, and you create a free account at the point the deck is generated. If a module deck is long enough that one set cannot cover it, uploading it again carries on into the next stretch of slides.

Only .pptx, the modern format PowerPoint has saved by default since 2007. If you have an older .ppt file, open it, choose Save As, pick PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx), and the upload will work. The conversion takes a few seconds and changes nothing about your slides. The reason for the boundary is that .ppt is an old binary format with a completely different internal structure, while .pptx is a zipped package of XML that the text can be read out of reliably. Supporting the binary format would mean guessing at bytes, and a wrong guess produces cards built on garbled text rather than an honest error. Google Slides and Keynote decks work the same way: export or download them as .pptx first, and they upload like any other deck. If your course only ever publishes slides as PDF, that is fine too, since PDF is read directly and needs no conversion at all.

GeniusPal reads the text content of the file you upload, which includes the notes attached to your slides as well as the text on them. That is often where the real explanation lives, since a slide carries a heading and four bullets while the notes carry the sentence that makes them mean something. Slides that carry their meaning only in images give it nothing to work from, so a deck that is mostly diagrams, graphs, and photographs produces fewer cards than a text-heavy one. A label typed into a text box is read; the same label baked into a picture is not. If your course uses a heavily visual deck, it is worth uploading the accompanying handout or reading list alongside it, so the cards cover the ideas the diagrams were illustrating.

No, there is no export today. The specific loss with slide-sourced cards is context. A card written from lecture slides sits in the order the lecture built the idea, next to the other cards from that module, and studying it here keeps it beside the deck it came from and the quiz over the same questions. Exported to Anki or Quizlet it arrives as a loose pair of text fields dropped into a pile with everything else you have ever imported, cut off from the lecture that gave it meaning and from the record of which cards you keep missing. You study the deck inside GeniusPal, which is also where the quiz and written recall modes over the same questions live, and where the cards you get wrong come back around.

Your first 2 decks cost nothing and need no card. Slides arrive on a timetable, which makes the arithmetic here unusually easy to do in advance. A taught module posting two lecture decks a week is roughly eight uploads a month, so four modules running at once is around thirty. Student, $14.99 monthly against 100 sets, absorbs a full timetable with room to spare. Genius asks $59.99 once for the year under a fair-use ceiling of 1000 monthly, which costs less than two months of Student. The 2 free sets never come back, so treat them as a look at one module rather than a way to keep pace with a semester. A hundred-slide deck is also where the jump from 10 cards to 30 earns its keep, since a longer set is written across proportionally more of the deck rather than asking twice about the same slides.