Turn PowerPoint to Quiz Questions
including the speaker notes behind the slides.

Turn PowerPoint to quiz questions one slide at a time

A deck has no outline in the sense a Word document does. There are no heading styles to read, no nesting, nothing that says this part belongs under that one. What it has instead is a hard boundary every few hundred words, which is the slide itself, and a title placeholder on most of them that the person building the deck filled in.

That boundary is the whole scoping mechanism here. The list you see after dropping a file is one row per slide, in the order the deck presents them rather than the order the files happen to be named, each with the title its placeholder holds and a word count. Tick the four slides covering the topic you are behind on and the questions come from those four, because the text sent for generation is those four slides and nothing else.

The alternative, and the normal way this is done, is to flatten a fifty slide deck into one block of text and ask for ten questions. They spread across the entire lecture and about half land on the introduction and the summary. Scoping the input is the only reliable way to aim them.

The half of the deck nobody exports

Inside a .pptx, each slide can have a notes slide sitting behind it as a separate file, tied to that slide by a stored relationship rather than by a matching number. It is where a lecturer writes what they intend to say, and it is the part that never appears in a PDF export, never shows in presenter view for the audience, and is thrown away by every tool that reads a deck as a picture.

It is also, very often, the only prose in the whole file. The slide says three causes of inflation. The note says demand pull inflation happens when spending outruns what the economy can produce, which is the sentence a fair question can be built from. The picker counts those characters for you and leaves the toggle off until you decide, because a deck whose notes are a word for word script would otherwise double your material without asking.

If the box is greyed out, the deck genuinely has no notes. A notes slide holding nothing but the page number is treated as empty rather than counted, since PowerPoint writes that number in whether anyone typed anything or not.

Why bullet fragments make weak questions

This is the honest limit of turning any deck into a quiz, and it has nothing to do with which tool you use. A question needs a claim to test. Slide text is written to be spoken over, so it carries labels rather than claims: three causes, key differences, remember this. A generator handed labels produces questions that read like the slide, which is to say questions you can answer by having seen the slide rather than by understanding it.

Two things fix it, and both are available before you press Generate. Turn on the speaker notes, where the claims usually live. Or pick fewer, denser slides rather than the whole deck, so the generator works from the parts that were written out. A deck of pure section dividers and photographs will disappoint, and the slide list tells you that in advance instead of leaving you to discover it in the output.

Diagrams, tables and blank slides

Slides holding only an image come through empty and are greyed out in the list. There is no character recognition step anywhere here, so words baked into a screenshot are not words as far as this is concerned. The count of those slides is shown up front, because a deck that is forty percent diagrams produces far fewer questions than its slide count suggests.

Tables are different. Their cells live outside the ordinary shape structure in the file, so they are collected separately and folded into the slide they sit on, in reading order. A comparison table becomes material rather than being silently skipped, which matters because comparison tables are usually the most testable thing in a lecture deck.

Anki, CSV and what your platform wants

What comes out is tab separated text that Anki imports directly, and a CSV that opens in any spreadsheet. If your goal is self testing, the Anki route is the short one and the questions carry over as they are.

Not ideal for: a one click import into a learning platform. Canvas wants QTI packages, Kahoot wants its own spreadsheet layout, Moodle wants one of its plain text formats. A CSV can be reshaped into any of them, but that is a step you take, not one this does. If the import is the entire job, a converter built for that platform is the better tool and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Where this stops

It reads .pptx only. A .ppt is an old binary container rather than a zip of XML, so it needs a different reader entirely, and the tool says which one it got instead of failing vaguely. Google Slides and Keynote both export to .pptx, notes included, which is a thirty second detour.

Decks over 15MB do not go through, and that is nearly always the images. A copy saved without media carries every word this page reads. Animations, transitions, embedded video and the design itself are all irrelevant here: what gets read is the text on the slide, the text in its tables, and the text in its notes. Two things are deliberately left out. Text drawn inside a SmartArt graphic sits in a different part of the file and does not come through, and the automatic fields PowerPoint fills in, the slide number and the date, are stripped so a page number never arrives looking like content.