How to make Anki cards fast.
Most of the time you spend making Anki cards is not spent thinking about the material. It goes into copying text out of a PDF, cleaning up the formatting, typing cloze syntax by hand, and switching windows. This guide is about cutting that part out, whatever you are studying from.
The same three moves every time.
Every source below works this way. Learn it once on a PDF and everything else is the same motion.
Highlight the sentence
Highlight the sentence you want to remember. It becomes the body of the card.
Hide the key term
Highlight the word or phrase inside it you need to recall, and it becomes the cloze deletion. Do it again for a card with more than one blank.
Send to Anki
Look over what you made, fix anything, and push it into your own decks with tags attached.
From whatever you're studying.
From a PDF
Textbook chapters, journal papers, slide handouts, and scanned packets. Open the file, highlight, done. Image-only scans get on-device OCR first, so they behave like digital text. Full detail: PDF to Anki.
From PowerPoint slides
Open a PPTX and highlight the bullet that matters, or drag a box around a diagram for image occlusion.
From your own notes
Notes in a Word document open the same way. Highlight your own summary sentences and they become cards, in your own wording.
From a website
Enter a web address and the page opens in a built-in browser tab, where you highlight it like any document. See website to Anki.
From a lecture recording
A recording becomes a study doc where every line cites a timestamp, and clicking a line seeks the video. Highlight it like any document: video to Anki.
With AI doing the first pass
Optional. Hand over a chapter and approve the drafts you like, each one linked to its source sentence. See AI Anki cards.
Questions, answered
What's the fastest way to make Anki cards from a PDF?
Highlight directly in the PDF instead of copying text out of it. In Clozely the source and the card panel share one window, so there's no app switching and no cloze syntax to type. For a long chapter, the optional AI can draft a first pass you approve.
Can I make cards without paying for AI?
Yes. The manual workflow is the whole product; AI is an optional add-on. Manual highlighting is included in the one-time purchase and the free 14-day trial.
How many cards should one lecture produce?
Fewer than you think. A dense hour usually holds 20 to 40 facts genuinely worth long-term retention. A card for every slide is how decks become unreviewable.
Do the cards work with my existing Anki setup?
Yes. Clozely sends ordinary cloze notes into your own decks with your tags, and you review in Anki on whatever device you already use. It doesn't replace Anki or change how your collection works.
Try it on tonight's reading.
Full app, free for 14 days, no credit card. Your cards stay yours after the trial.