PowerPoint to Anki: upload the .pptx 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: pick your level, pick your outputs, wait a few minutes.

A PA student on r/PAstudent described the alternative. Split-screening PowerPoint and Anki through lectures of 100-plus slides, copying and pasting while the professor kept advancing, and asking whether it was possible to do that and still pay attention. Uploading the deck after class replaces the copy-paste half. The listening half stays yours.

What comes back is the deck the PDF to Anki page describes: a standard .apkg for Anki desktop, AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid, five card shapes chosen by what each slide is doing, a why-it-matters line and the source slide on the back of every card, and roughly under three cards per content slide with objectives first. The same upload can also produce practice questions and a Lecture Story. Each output is one credit.

The conversion keeps what is on the slide face and drops the notes pane. For most lecturers that costs nothing, because the slide holds the content and the notes are reminders 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, export to PDF with Notes Pages as the layout, so each page carries the slide with its notes underneath, and upload that PDF. Or copy the notes out and paste them as text on the upload page, where they become their own source.

Keynote and Google Slides need one export step either way.

A PowerPoint over 100 slides is refused at upload. A long PDF opens the splitter, but a .pptx is still a .pptx on your side and only becomes a PDF on the server, so the cut has to happen before upload. Either export the deck to PDF and let the splitter cut it, or save copies in PowerPoint with the slides outside each range deleted. 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.

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. A medical student on r/medicalschoolanki, in a thread about turning university PowerPoints into cards, wrote off AI-made decks because they wanted cards that used "the important images, diagrams, pathways, graphs". 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, so start from the file the professor posted.

Two limits. The image is on the back, as the source you check the card against, and never 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 tool. The model can also omit a detail or get one wrong, so check the cards against the slide before the first review.