Most students keep their notes in a .docx and then copy them into a card app by hand. Upload the file instead and get the deck written for you.
Bigger sets read more of your document. Included with Student and Genius.
PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or a link · up to 10 MB · start without an account
The notes document you already keep, however long it has grown over the term. Up to 10 MB.
It finds the ideas worth carding and phrases the prompt and the answer, which is the slow half of making flashcards.
Flip through, rate yourself honestly, and let the cards you miss come back around sooner than the ones you know.
A paragraph from a pharmacology notes document, and the card GeniusPal writes from it. Sample material, written by us to show the shape of the output.
Your Word document
Pharmacology notes term 2.docx
Beta blockers reduce cardiac output by antagonising beta-1 receptors in the myocardium. Non-selective agents also block beta-2 in bronchial smooth muscle, which is why they are avoided in asthma.
The card GeniusPal writes
Why are non-selective beta blockers avoided in patients with asthma?
They antagonise beta-2 receptors in bronchial smooth muscle as well as beta-1 in the heart, and blocking beta-2 causes bronchoconstriction.
The card asks for the mechanism rather than the rule, so recalling it means holding the receptor subtypes and their locations rather than a memorised contraindication list.
Flashcard mode is included with Student and Genius. Every generated set is scoreable as a quiz on every plan, Free included.
Word is still the default for typed notes on most courses, and it is the format with the least support in card apps. Uploading it removes an afternoon of copying.
A document organised with headings and lists gives the reader a map of what belongs with what, so the deck follows the shape you already imposed on the material.
Anyone can list twenty terms. Writing a prompt that makes you retrieve rather than recognise is the part that takes hours, and that is the part being done here.
The scored quiz over your document is free on every plan, and a paid plan studies the same material as cards or as written recall.
Wondering how to drill a deck properly? Read our guide to using flashcards effectively.
Only .docx, the format Word has produced by default since 2007. If you have an older .doc, open it and use Save As to write a .docx, which takes a few seconds and alters nothing about the content. The distinction is not fussiness: .docx is a zipped package of XML that the text can be lifted from cleanly, while .doc is a legacy binary format that would have to be interpreted by guesswork, and guessing wrong yields cards built on scrambled words rather than a clear error message. Google Docs and Pages both handle this the same way, through Download or Export as Word. Documents saved from those tools read exactly as a native Word file does, including their headings and lists, so nothing about the deck changes and no reformatting is needed first.
The body text of the document is what gets read. Tracked changes are taken at their accepted state, so a document mid-revision produces cards from the text as it currently stands rather than from a mixture of both versions. Margin comments are not treated as material, which is usually what you want, since comments tend to be notes to yourself about the writing rather than the subject. Images, including pasted diagrams and screenshots of slides, carry no text and contribute nothing, so a document whose substance is a series of pasted images will produce a thin deck. Headings, bullet lists, numbered lists, and tables all read well and actively help, because they tell the reader which ideas group together and that structure carries through into how the cards are written.
Flashcard mode is not on Free, and it is worth being straight about that. A Free account generates 2 study sets from your documents and studies them as scored multiple-choice quizzes, which is a complete and genuinely useful way to work a Word file, but flipping the same set as cards needs Student at $14.99 a month or Genius at $59.99 for a year. Student carries 100 generations monthly and Genius runs to a fair-use ceiling of 1000. The practical route is to upload your document on Free first and sit the quiz, since that tells you whether the questions are worth having before any money changes hands, and the same set becomes a deck the moment you upgrade, with no need to upload the document a second time or spend another generation on it.
Up to 10 MB, and a plain notes document holds an enormous amount of text before it gets anywhere near that, so the limit is realistically only reached by files stuffed with pasted images. Length in pages is not itself a problem, because the reader works through the whole document instead of stopping partway. What length does affect is how much of it one set can cover, which is why the paid tiers raising a set to 30 matters more for a term-long document than for a week of notes. If a single file has grown to cover an entire module, uploading it again later continues into the next stretch of the material rather than recarding the opening sections, so you can work through a long document across several sittings.
A table of terms is a fair instinct. Here is how the options compare: the best AI flashcard makers, and the best free flashcard apps.