How to Convert Your Flashcards to Anki (.apkg) — From Quizlet, CSV, Markdown or PDF
Your cards are trapped in an export file and Anki wants .apkg. Here is how to convert Quizlet exports, CSV files, Markdown notes and even PDFs into Anki decks, free and in your browser.
Sooner or later, every serious flashcard user meets the .apkg problem. You have cards — in a Quizlet set, a CSV from a spreadsheet, a Markdown file of notes, or a lecture PDF that isn't cards yet — and you want them in Anki, which speaks its own package format. Anki's built-in import handles some plain-text cases, but the setup is fiddly, and Quizlet in particular stopped making export easy.
The good news: converting to .apkg is a solved problem, and you can do it in the browser without installing anything or uploading your cards anywhere. Here's the route for each starting format.
What an .apkg file actually is
An .apkg file is just a ZIP archive containing a small SQLite database — your notes, cards, and deck metadata in the structure Anki expects. That's why hand-rolling one isn't practical, but generating one programmatically is: a converter fills the database and zips it up, and Anki imports it like any shared deck.
One consequence worth knowing: because the format is self-contained, a converted deck imports cleanly on Anki desktop, AnkiDroid, and AnkiMobile alike. Convert once, study anywhere.
Quizlet → Anki
Quizlet still has a text export, it's just buried: open your set, choose Export, and copy the resulting text. Then paste it into the free Anki converter (Quizlet tab). Separators between term and definition are detected automatically, and you can override them if your set uses something unusual.
Click convert, download the .apkg, and in Anki use File → Import. Done — your set is now a proper Anki deck with none of the retyping. There's a dedicated walkthrough on the Quizlet to Anki page, including what to do with multi-line definitions.
If you're leaving Quizlet altogether rather than just borrowing Anki's scheduler, our comparison of Anki alternatives covers the landscape.
CSV → Anki
Spreadsheets are where a lot of decks are born — vocabulary lists, term/definition tables, shared class documents. Export the sheet as CSV, then feed it to the converter's CSV tab. It follows RFC 4180, which is the boring-but-important part: quoted fields, commas inside quotes, and line breaks inside cells all survive the trip, which is exactly where naive importers mangle your cards. You choose which columns become front and back.
Details and edge cases live on the CSV to Anki page.
Markdown → Anki
If your notes live in Markdown (Obsidian folks, this is you), you can go straight from notes to deck. The converter's Markdown mode reads Question::Answer lines as basic cards — and it also understands Anki's cloze markers, so a line like The mitochondria produce {{c1::ATP}} becomes a real cloze card, not a mangled basic one.
That makes a nice pipeline: keep notes in Markdown as your source of truth, regenerate the .apkg whenever the notes change. The Markdown to Anki page shows the exact syntax.
PDF → Anki (when you don't have cards yet)
The formats above assume your cards already exist. A lecture PDF is a different problem: the content needs to become cards first. For that, the PDF to flashcards tool extracts the text in your browser, builds a prompt for your own Claude (a free claude.ai account works), and parses Claude's reply into cards — which you can then download directly as .apkg. The full route is described on the PDF to Anki page, and there's a longer guide in how to turn lecture slides into flashcards.
The fine print, honestly
A few things worth knowing before you convert:
- Nothing is uploaded. Parsing and the
.apkgbuild run entirely in your browser. Your cards never touch a server, and no account is needed for the download. - There's a per-run ceiling. The converter handles up to 2,000 cards per run. Bigger collections just take multiple runs, one deck each.
- Basic and cloze cards convert cleanly. Fancier Anki note types (image occlusion, multi-field templates) are out of scope for a text-based conversion.
- Scheduling doesn't transfer. A conversion carries your content, not your review history — the deck arrives in Anki as new cards. That's inherent to starting from an export, not a converter quirk.
Do you even need Anki in the middle?
One question worth asking before you convert: what are you actually after — Anki itself, or just proper spaced repetition for cards that are currently stuck somewhere without it?
If it's Anki — the add-ons, the community decks, the offline desktop app — the converters above get you there in a couple of minutes. If it's spaced repetition, you can also save the same converted cards straight into a StudyCards deck and study them on any device with scheduling built in — plus your own Claude connected for generating new cards as the semester goes on. Both exits are one click apart in the converter, so you don't have to decide before you've seen your deck.
Either way, start with the conversion: open the Anki converter, paste what you have, and take your cards with you. They're yours, after all.