Turn lecture slides into an Anki deck
Making cards can take longer than reviewing them. This workflow gets you from a slide deck to an Anki import without paying anyone, and keeps you in control of what goes in.
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A worked example
Warfarin inhibits vitamin K epoxide reductase, which reduces the activation of clotting factors II, VII, IX and X. Therapy is monitored with the INR.
- Which enzyme does warfarin inhibit?Vitamin K epoxide reductase [slide 22]
- Which clotting factors does warfarin affect?II, VII, IX and X [slide 22]
- Which test monitors warfarin therapy?The INR [slide 22]
We wrote this example to show what good output looks like. Real results depend on your slides, so always check them against your own course.
The free workflow
Upload your slides to an AI assistant with the prompt below, paste the rows it returns into the CSV to Anki tool, name your deck, and download the file. In Anki choose File, Import, read the preview and import. Then skim the new cards in the browser and delete the weak ones before they enter your reviews.
Keep the slide number on the card
Put the slide number at the end of the back of each card. When a card seems wrong during a review, you can find the source in seconds rather than losing trust in the whole deck.
Use a shared deck where one exists
For board exams, shared decks such as AnKing are likely to beat anything you generate. Lecture decks earn their place when your professor’s slides go beyond them or the exam is written in-house. Many students use both, with a tag per lecture to keep them apart.
Do not add everything
Generated decks grow quickly, and an oversized deck makes daily reviews hard to keep up with. Suspend what your lecturer did not stress, and add a lecture at a time rather than a whole semester at once.
A prompt you can use with any AI assistant
Using only the attached lecture slides, write Anki flashcards. Output plain text with one card per line, the front and back separated by a single tab, and no header, numbering or commentary. One fact per card. Keep fronts specific enough to make sense on their own. End every back with the slide number in square brackets, for example [slide 12].
Check the result
- Is each line exactly two columns? Rows with no tab get skipped.
- Do fronts make sense without the slide in front of you?
- Pick five slide numbers at random and check those cards against the slides.
- Would you lose a mark if you did not know this? If not, delete it.
Free tools for this
- CSV to Anki Turn a spreadsheet or two columns of text into a file Anki imports in one step.
- Anki to PDF Turn an Anki .apkg deck or text export into printable flashcard sheets, entirely in your browser.
What Quizard does here
- Quizard generates cards and questions from your slides, links each one to its slide, and exports to Anki and CSV on every plan.
- You can keep reviewing in Anki, or use Quizard’s daily session, which also brings back the questions you got wrong.
- Existing Anki decks can be imported into Quizard too, so you are not locked into either app.
When this is not the right approach. If you already keep up with hand-made cards and enjoy making them, keep going. Writing cards yourself is a form of studying, and nothing here replaces that for your hardest material.
Try it on one of your lectures