How to Import Flashcards From Anki, Quizlet or a Spreadsheet

Switching study apps usually means retyping everything, which is why most people don't switch. You shouldn't have to. If your cards exist anywhere as a table — an Anki export, a Quizlet set, a spreadsheet, a text file you keep meaning to tidy up — they can come across in one step.

What the file needs to look like

Two columns. First is the question, second is the answer. Anything after the second column is ignored, so you don't need to strip out tags, deck names or extra metadata before importing.

question,answer
What is the capital of France?,Paris
What is the capital of Japan?,Tokyo

The header row is optional. If the first line reads `question,answer` — or `front,back`, or `term,definition` — it's recognised and skipped rather than imported as a card. The delimiter is detected automatically, so comma, semicolon and tab files all work without you converting anything. That matters more than it sounds: Anki exports tab-separated, and spreadsheets in much of Europe export semicolons.

Exporting from Anki

1. Open the deck you want, then choose Export from the deck's gear menu (or File → Export).
2. Set the export format to Notes in Plain Text (.txt). This produces a tab-separated file, which knojo reads directly — no conversion needed.
3. Select the single deck rather than the whole collection, so you get one subject per file.
4. Turn off the HTML and media options if offered. Cards full of `<div>` tags import as literal markup.
5. Import the resulting `.txt` into knojo. The first two fields of each note become the question and answer.

Exporting from Quizlet

Quizlet's export gives you a block of text rather than a file: open the set, find the export option in its menu, and choose how terms and definitions should be separated. Pick comma or tab for the term/definition separator, and a new line between cards. Copy the result and paste it straight into knojo's import screen — there's a paste box next to the file picker precisely for this.

Exporting from Google Sheets or Excel

Put questions in column A and answers in column B, then File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv) in Sheets, or Save As → CSV in Excel. Any further columns you keep for your own bookkeeping are ignored on import, so there's no need to delete them first.

Importing into knojo

1. Create or pick the goal the cards belong to — imports always land in one goal, which keeps subjects from bleeding into each other.
2. Choose the file, or paste the text.
3. Tap Preview cards. You'll see how many cards are ready and how many rows were skipped, with the reason for each.
4. Check a few of the previewed cards. This is the moment to notice that an export brought over formatting you don't want.
5. Tap Import cards. They enter the goal's review queue from the next session.

What gets skipped, and why

The preview tells you exactly what didn't make it, rather than silently importing fewer cards than you expected. There are four reasons a row is dropped.

The "too long" limit is worth taking as feedback rather than an obstacle. An answer over 800 characters is almost never a flashcard — it's a paragraph that should become three or four separate cards. See how to make flashcards that actually work for how to split them.

What happens after the import

Imported cards don't arrive all at once in your review queue. Each goal has a daily pace, so new cards drip in a few at a time alongside the reviews that are due — which is the point. Five hundred cards landing in one session would be a wall; a handful a day is a habit. The scheduling follows the same spaced repetition logic as cards you write yourself.

If your deck came from Anki, it's worth reading why a simpler spaced repetition setup often works better before you rebuild your old settings. Most of what makes Anki hard is configuration you probably don't need.