Convert a PowerPoint Lecture to Anki Without Exporting It First

Drop the .pptx or .ppt on the upload page. The server converts it to PDF, one slide per page, and from there it follows the same path as any lecture PDF: choose your level, pick your outputs, watch the progress. A typical lecture takes a few minutes.

A PA student on r/PAstudent described the alternative: split-screening PowerPoint and Anki through 100-plus-slide lectures, copying and pasting while the professor kept advancing, and never getting the decks done in time. Their question was whether it was possible to do that and still pay attention. Uploading the deck after class replaces the copy-paste half of that. The listening half stays yours.

It also cuts the chain. A dental student on r/DentalSchool described running each lecture through Gemini, NotebookLM, Google Docs and Notability before it was studyable. The .pptx is the source. Start from it.

The conversion keeps what is on the slide face. Anything in the notes pane is dropped. For most lecturers that costs nothing, because the slide holds the content and the notes are prompts to themselves. For the professor who puts the teaching in the notes and leaves the slide as a heading and a picture, it matters a lot.

Two ways round it. In PowerPoint, print or export to PDF and choose Notes Pages as the layout, so each page carries the slide with its notes underneath, then upload that PDF. It follows the PDF to Anki path from there. Or copy the notes out and paste them as text on the upload page, where they become their own source.

Keynote and Google Slides both need one export step, notes or not.

A PowerPoint over 100 slides is refused at upload. Unlike a long PDF, it does not open the splitter, because the file is still a .pptx on your side and only becomes a PDF on the server. The cut has to happen in PowerPoint: save a copy, delete the slides outside the range you want, save again, repeat for the next range. Each part is its own upload, its own deck and its own credit.

Cut at lecture boundaries, not at slide 100. A PT student on r/PTschool wrote that some classes were “100 PowerPoint slides…EVERY CLASS”, and a classmate corrected them: some only had 97. At 97 you are fine. At 140, split into two decks that each match one lecture, because a deck that ends halfway through a topic is harder to finish.

The same deck a PDF gives you. A standard .apkg for Anki desktop, AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid, with five card shapes chosen by what each slide is doing, a short why-it-matters note, and the source slide image on the back. The generator prioritises learning objectives and stays under roughly three cards per content slide. The card types, the density guardrail and the four-pass check before the first review are all on the PDF to Anki page. From the conversion onward the two paths are identical.

The same upload can also produce a practice set and a Lecture Story. Each output is one credit, so Anki plus practice questions from the same slides is two.

A slide deck carries the diagram. Your typed notes carry your description of the diagram. When the source is the .pptx, the slide image lands on the back of the card, so a card about the coagulation cascade has the cascade under the answer, in the professor's own figure. A histology lecture keeps its micrographs. A pharmacology lecture keeps the dose table it came from.

That is the thing students say AI decks lose. One medical student on r/medicalschoolanki, in a thread about turning university PowerPoints into cards, wrote off AI-made decks for exactly this reason: they wanted cards that used “the important images, diagrams, pathways, graphs”. Uploading the deck itself, rather than a summary of it, is how the image stays attached to the fact. A PA student on r/PAstudent put the wider cost as spending “way too much time moving information around”. Every format change is a place the picture can fall out.

Two honest limits. The image is on the back, as the source you check the card against, not as the prompt on the front. And the tool does not do image occlusion. If you want a labelled anatomy figure with the labels hidden one at a time, build that in Anki's own image occlusion tool. What you get here is the whole slide behind every card that came from it.