Make flashcards from notes, then review them before you export.
Paste the notes, get a card for every line it can cut, and drill the deck right here. The cards you press Again on come back round, and when the session ends the download is rebuilt in that order.
- Splitting and reviewing both run in your browser. No account, no daily count, and the notes themselves are never uploaded.
- One line becomes one card, and a question line plus its answer line becomes one card. Anything it cannot cut is listed as skipped with the reason, not guessed at.
- Flip, grade, requeue. The again pile has to clear before the session ends.
- Export CSV or a tab separated file for Anki, ordered by how the session went.
Make flashcards from notes: paste, review, export
Copy and paste works with any of the shapes below, including a column pair pulled straight out of a spreadsheet.
Nothing pasted yet. Up to 300 cards a go, no sign in, no daily cap.
Where each line gets cut
A flashcard maker from notes has exactly one hard decision to make: given a line you wrote for yourself, which half is the prompt and which half is the answer. This page settles it with a rule you can check rather than a model you have to trust. Each line is scanned for the separators below and cut at whichever one appears first, so a line like Osmosis: water moving - down a gradient breaks at the colon and keeps the dash inside the answer, while gato - cat breaks at the dash.
| Separator | A line like this | Front / back |
|---|---|---|
| Colon | Osmosis: water crossing a membrane | Osmosis / water crossing a membrane |
| Dash, spaced (hyphen, en dash or em dash) | la biblioteca - the library | la biblioteca / the library |
| Tab | Ribosome<tab>Assembles proteins | Ribosome / Assembles proteins |
| Double colon | Article 5 :: collective defence | Article 5 / collective defence |
| Equals | K = degrees above absolute zero | K / degrees above absolute zero |
| Pipe | | Krebs cycle | citric acid cycle | | Krebs cycle / citric acid cycle |
| Q and A, two lines | Q: Which amendment? then A: The Fourth | Which amendment? / The Fourth |
Bullets, numbering and hyphens
Leading bullet characters and list numbers are stripped before the split, so notes pasted out of a document keep working. The dash and pipe forms need a space on both sides, which is the reason hyphenated words and phone numbers stay in one piece instead of being torn down the middle. All three spaced dash characters count, the plain hyphen and the two longer typographic dashes, because notes pasted out of a word processor often carry the longer ones without your having typed them. Runs of spaces collapse to one on both halves. A front longer than 200 characters is treated as a sentence of prose and skipped, because a card whose prompt is a paragraph is not a card, and an answer longer than 600 characters is trimmed at that point rather than carried whole into the file.
Duplicates get dropped, and the count says so
If the same term appears twice, the second copy is skipped and counted. That matters more than it sounds: the same first field twice is exactly what an importer flags later, so removing it here means the file you take away does not argue with the deck you already have.
What the review loop records
Almost every tool that will make flashcards from notes stops the moment the list exists. Here the cards are the halfway point: once they exist the page stops being a converter and starts being a session. A card shows its front, you turn it over with a click or the space bar, and then you say whether you had it. Knew it retires the card. Again pushes it to the back of the queue, so it comes round before the session can finish, and the press is counted against that specific card.
The counter above the card is deliberately three numbers rather than one: where you are, how many are left, and how many have landed in the again pile. That third number is the one worth watching, because it is the only honest signal in the whole page about whether the notes you pasted are actually learned yet.
The summary, and what it does not claim
At the end you get four counts: cleared first try, needed a repeat, answers given and Again presses. All four are tallies of what you just did in this browser tab. None of them is a retention estimate, a due date or a grade. There is no scheduler here and there should not be, since the tools that own that job do it far better. If you want the scheduling maths, the spaced repetition calculator models the daily load a deck creates, and the forgetting curve calculator zooms in on a single card.
Nothing about the session is stored. Close the tab and the counts are gone, which is the trade for not asking who you are. Download before you leave.
The two files you can take away
The download is where the review loop earns its keep, and it is the part that is different from anywhere else you can make flashcards from notes. Before you review, the export is just your cards in the order the lines came out of the notes. After a session it is rebuilt: every card you pressed Again on moves to the front, most-repeated first, and the cards you cleared straight away follow in their original order. Import that into anything with a queue and the material you fumbled is the material you see first.
A flashcard maker CSV, and a smaller one
The CSV carries three columns, front, back and the line number it came from, with a byte order mark and CRLF endings so a spreadsheet opens it without mangling accents. Cells that begin with a character a spreadsheet would read as a formula are made inert first, which matters because your notes are arbitrary text. The second download is the short one: only the cards you fumbled, hardest first, which is usually the file worth keeping.
The Anki file
The other download is a plain tab separated .txt. The Anki manual states that any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met, and tabs are the separator least likely to collide with your own punctuation. Import with note type Basic and the field separator set to Tab. Worth knowing before you import the short file as well: the manual also states that when importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is a duplicate, so the fumbled cards will be recognised as the ones you already have rather than added a second time.
It does
- Split up to 300 cards per paste, offline, in your browser
- Show the line number and separator behind every card
- List the lines it refused to guess at, with the reason
- Run a flip and grade session with a requeued again pile
- Export CSV and tab separated, reordered by the session
It does not
- Write cards for you, or reword what you pasted
- Handle images, audio or cloze deletions
- Schedule anything, or estimate your retention
- Save a set, sync, or remember you between visits
- Read a PDF or a video on this page
Make flashcards from notes without a daily count
Every other tool on this site sends your text to a server and asks a model for questions, which costs money per run, which is why the free tier there is two generations a day. This page has no such cost. The splitter is a few dozen lines of pattern matching and the session is state in your browser, so there is nothing to meter and no signed-in tier that unlocks a bigger number. That is the whole reason to create flashcards from notes this way when the notes are already in a term-and-definition shape: you are not paying for a model to rewrite something you already wrote correctly.
The honest limit is the 300 cards per paste, and it exists for the session rather than for billing. Past a few hundred cards a single sitting stops being a review and turns into data entry with a flip animation attached.
This page or the card generator
Two pages here will make flashcards from notes, and picking the wrong one wastes your time, so the difference is worth stating plainly rather than leaving you to work out.
Use this page when your notes already contain both halves of the card. Term and definition, word and translation, question line followed by answer line: the pairing exists, it just needs cutting, and cutting is deterministic, instant and free of any daily quota. Then review here and let the session decide the export order.
Use the Anki card generator when your notes are prose. A paragraph out of a textbook has no separator to cut at, and the only way to get cards from it is to have something read it and propose the pairs, which is what that page does, with the source sentence attached to each card and a two-a-day free limit. Same argument applies to turning a PDF into flashcards, where the text arrives as paragraphs, and to turning notes into a quiz when what you want is multiple choice rather than two-sided cards.
The short version: prose needs a generator, pairs need a splitter, and only this page reviews the result before handing it over.
Questions about the flashcard maker
How do I make flashcards from notes I have already written?
Paste them into the box and press the button. Most lines are handled on their own and cut at the first separator in them: a colon, a spaced dash, a tab, a double colon, an equals sign or a table pipe. A question line followed by an answer line is the exception, and is read as one card across two lines. No wording is invented or reworded. The tidying that does happen is small and worth knowing about: runs of spaces collapse to one, a leading bullet or list number is dropped, the outer pipes of a table row are dropped, and an answer longer than 600 characters is trimmed at that point.
Is this flashcard maker free with no limit?
The splitting and the review session run in your browser, so there is no account, no daily count and nothing to spend. The cap that does exist is 300 cards per paste, because a session longer than that stops being a session. The generator on the rest of the site is the part with a two-a-day free limit, since that one calls a model on a server.
Why did some of my lines not turn into cards?
Open the skipped list and it tells you which of four reasons applied to each one. Most common is no separator, or one side empty: a paragraph of prose, a bare heading, a page number, or a line like "Osmosis:" with nothing after the colon. There is no honest way to guess where the front ends there, so the line is reported rather than turned into a card that says something you did not write. The other three are a front longer than 200 characters, which is a sentence rather than a term; a front that already appeared earlier in the paste, since duplicates get dropped; and anything past the 300-card cap. Fix the line, paste again, and the count moves.
What does the review session change about the export?
The order, and it gives you a second smaller file. Every card you press Again on is recorded, and when the session ends the export is rebuilt with those cards first, most-repeated at the top. You can also download only the cards you fumbled. On the other pages the export is fixed the moment the cards exist, because nothing has watched you use them yet.
Can I put the cards into Anki?
Yes, through the tab separated download. The Anki manual states that any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met. In Anki: File, Import, note type Basic, separator Tab, field one to Front, field two to Back. One thing to know before you import the smaller file: the manual also states that when importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is a duplicate, so re-importing the cards you fumbled will be flagged against the ones already in your collection rather than added twice.
Is this a free flashcard maker like Quizlet?
It overlaps with the part of Quizlet people use most, which is to make flashcards from notes you typed as a term and definition list and then drill them, and it does that part without a sign in. It is not a replacement for the rest: no classes, no shared sets, no leaderboards, no images or audio on cards, and nothing is stored between visits. If you want a set you can come back to next week, put the CSV somewhere you keep files.
Does it work for exam revision or for language vocabulary?
Both, and they use the box differently. Exam term lists usually arrive as colon lines out of lecture notes, or as a tab separated pair copied from a spreadsheet. Vocabulary tends to arrive as dashed pairs, one language on each side, which is why the dash needs a space on both sides: hyphenated words stay whole. The review loop is the same either way, and the again pile is the useful output in both cases.
Related tools
QuizPaste is not affiliated with Anki, AnkiWeb or Quizlet. Anki is open source software by Damien Elmes; we name it and quote its manual only to describe the file format this export is compatible with.