How to turn lecture slides into Anki cards (3 ways)

Anki can't open PowerPoint or PDF files, so the slides have to become cards first. By hand works but is slow. A chat AI is faster but invents things and loses the slide numbers. Uploading the PDF to a tool that keeps the page on every card is the quickest way to check each card against the slide it came from.

My first time was a pathology lecture: 56 slides, about two hours by hand. That’s two hours before a single review.

First: get the slides as a PDF

Anki can only import text files and Anki packages (Anki manual), so a .pptx never goes straight in. Whatever way you pick, a PDF of the slides is the easiest thing to work from: it keeps the page numbers, and you can keep it open next to Anki.

• PowerPoint: File, then Export, then PDF.
• Google Slides: File, then Download, then PDF document.
• Keynote: File, then Export To, then PDF.

Way 1: by hand in Anki

Go through the PDF one slide at a time and ask one question per slide: what will the exam ask about this? Then make the card for that, not for every bullet.

• Sentences and lists: a cloze card. Select the word and press the cloze button, Anki writes {{c1::…}}. A new number makes a new card, the same number hides both on one card (manual).
• A clear question with one answer: a basic card.
• Diagrams: copy the slide image and make an Image Occlusion note (Add, then Type, then Image Occlusion). It’s built in since Anki 23.10.
• Tag every card with the lecture and the slide number, so you can find the slide again when a card makes no sense in three weeks.

For lists, the cloze maker does the fiddly part: paste a sentence from a slide, click the words to hide, and copy the result into Anki.

Way 2: with ChatGPT or Claude

Pasting a lecture into a chat AI and asking for cards is quicker, and our prompt page gives you a prompt that answers in lines our converter turns into an Anki file. It has three problems you have to fix yourself:

• It sometimes writes facts that aren’t on the slides.
• Long lectures get summarised and slides get skipped.
• The cards lose the slide number, so checking them means hunting through the PDF.

Paste one section at a time (10 to 15 slides), and ask for 20 to 30 cards, not 100.

Using Claude? You can also add AnkiDecks to Claude and make the deck right in the chat, with the slide number on every card.

Way 3: upload the PDF

This is what we built AnkiDecks for: upload the PDF or PowerPoint, check the cards, download the deck. Before writing this, we ran four of my real lectures through it:

Every card shows the line and page it came from, and a check called Source Check removes any card whose quote isn’t in your file. You still read the cards: the point is that checking one takes a glance at the quote, not a search through 68 slides.

Mistakes that waste the most time

• A card for every bullet. Most bullets are context, not exam facts.
• Cards that only make sense next to the slide, like "What does this graph show?".
• Making the cards weeks after the lecture, when the review pile is already huge.
• No tags. Without the lecture and slide, a confusing card is a dead end.

Which one I use

I upload everything now, to AnkiDecks (I built it for exactly this). Making cards by hand was too slow for me: two hours for one 56-slide pathology lecture.