PowerPoint to flashcards

Turn a lecture deck into flashcards

Forty slides of bullet fragments are hard to revise from, because the bullets were never the lecture — they were the headings for it. Upload the .pptx and Stydra reads the slides and the speaker notes together, in the order the deck presents them, and writes cards you can actually be tested on.

Upload your slides — it's freeOr paste text, no account

Uploading a file — PDF, slides, Word, or photos of pages — needs a free account, no card. The demo takes pasted text and needs no account at all.

How it works

  1. 01

    Upload the .pptx

    Drag the file in or pick it from your files. Slides are read in the order the deck presents them, not the order they were created in — so a deck that has been reordered, merged or repaired still comes out in the order you sat through. Word (.docx) and PDF files go through the same tab.

  2. 02

    The speaker notes come with it

    Which notes belong to which slide is read from the deck's own internal links rather than guessed from file numbers, because PowerPoint numbers notes in the order they were typed. A slide that is a single diagram is still kept if the lecturer wrote an explanation underneath it — that paragraph is usually the most studiable thing in the file.

  3. 03

    Study it in a way that shows what you don't know

    Cards stream in as they're written, numbered against the slides they came from. Flip through them, or use Recall Mode: the card stays hidden, you type the answer in your own words, and it tells you which parts you actually had.

What you get

  • Flashcards written from the slides and the speaker notes together
  • Slides read in presented order, so the cards follow the lecture
  • Recall Mode — type the answer from memory and get it graded, not just revealed
  • A quiz that explains the misconception behind each wrong answer
  • A study guide and key terms across the whole deck
  • A weak-spots session built only from the cards you keep fumbling
  • Spaced repetition, so hard cards come back sooner
  • An audio recap of the deck for the walk to campusMax plan

Everything without a tag is on the free plan. See pricing for what the paid ones cost.

The slides are the index, not the lecture

Revising from a deck usually means reading a bullet, recognising it, and moving on — which feels like covering the material and is closer to reading a table of contents. The bullet was a prompt for a sentence somebody said, and recognising the prompt is not the same as being able to produce the sentence. Turning the deck into questions forces the difference into the open, and pulling in the speaker notes is what gives the questions something to be about: a card generated from "Three mechanisms" alone is a card about nothing.

Questions

What if my slides are mostly images?

Text extraction reads the text on a slide and its speaker notes. A slide that is a photograph or a diagram with nothing typed on it and no notes underneath contributes nothing — that is a real limit, not a rare edge case in a science deck. The way round it is to export the deck to PDF and upload that instead: a PDF with no extractable text is read with vision, so the diagrams get looked at rather than skipped.

Does it read the speaker notes?

Yes, and it matches each note to the slide it belongs to using the deck's own relationships. That sounds like a detail until it goes wrong: notes are numbered in the order they were typed, so a deck with notes on some slides and not others will hand you slide 8's explanation labelled as slide 3 if a tool guesses from the filename.

Can I upload several weeks of slides at once?

One document at a time. If you select more, the screen names the ones it isn't reading rather than quietly taking the first — but you'll need a pass per deck. Photos and a document can't go in the same upload either; do one, then the other.

Do I need an account?

For a file, yes — a free one, no credit card, three packs a month. If you only want to see what the cards look like first, the demo takes pasted text and needs no account at all — paste a few slides' worth in.

Does Google Slides or Keynote work?

Export to .pptx or PDF first and upload that. Both apps have it under File → Download or File → Export.

Upload this week's deck

One file, a free account, no card. If the cards aren't better than re-reading the bullets, you've lost two minutes.

Upload your slides — it's freeOr paste text, no account

See pricing for what the paid plans add.