Free Anki Deck Maker

Worked example

Press "Try a sample". The box fills with ten Spanish lines, from "hola" and "hello" to "beber" and "to drink", each with a tab between the two words. "Deck name" fills in as "Spanish basics", and the separator menu reads "Detect automatically (Tab (Quizlet, Excel))". The page says "10 lines → 10 cards", shows the first card ("hola") that you can flip with "Tap to flip", and lists every line under Front, Back and Tags. The button reads "Download Anki deck (10 cards)". Now pick "Basic and reversed". The hint changes to "Two cards per line: front → back and back → front.", the count becomes "10 lines → 20 cards" and the button says 20 cards. Press it. After "Building the deck…", Spanish basics.apkg is saved and the page says "Your deck is ready: 20 cards."

Which settings to use, and the limits

• Put one card on each line and pick the separator. "Front and back are separated by" offers Tab, Comma, Semicolon, Dash, Equals, Colon and Bar. "Detect automatically" tries them in the order tab, bar, semicolon, spaced dash, equals, colon, comma, and takes the first that appears on at least 80% of the lines. If none does, it takes the one found on most lines. A dash only splits when it has a space on each side, so "hola - hello" works and "hola-hello" does not. For Dash, Equals and Colon only the first one in the line splits, so the rest stays on the back. If the guess is wrong, choose the separator yourself.
• Use a tab or quotes when definitions contain commas. With Tab, Comma, Semicolon or Bar, the line is read like a spreadsheet row. A cell that starts with a double quote can hold the separator and even line breaks, and two quotes in a row stand for one quote. The third cell on a line becomes the card's tags, split at spaces and commas and shown in the Tags column, and any cell after the third is ignored. So an unquoted comma in a definition moves the rest of it into the tags. Quizlet exports and two Excel columns use tabs, which avoids this.
• Choose the card type. "Basic" makes one card per line: you see the front and recall the back. "Basic and reversed" makes two cards per line, front to back and back to front, so the card count is double the line count. "Type in the answer" makes one card per line where you type the back and Anki checks your spelling. The notes use the note types "LibraTool Basic", "LibraTool Basic (and reversed card)" and "LibraTool Basic (type in the answer)". Cards use a fixed plain layout: centred Arial at 24 px, with night-mode colours.
• Use the header and swap options, and read the preview. Tick "First row is a header" when the first row of the list holds column names; that row is left out. Tick "Swap front and back" to learn in the other direction. Lines with a front but no back, or a back but no front, are left out, and the page says "3 lines have no back side and will be left out." Blank lines are ignored without a note. The preview table shows the first 50 cards and then "…and 12 more" (your own number).
• Open a file instead of pasting. The drop zone, "Or open a CSV, text or Excel file", takes .csv, .tsv, .txt, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xls and .ods files, one at a time, and puts the text in the box. For a workbook it reads only the first sheet, uses the first column as the front, the second as the back and the third as tags, and sets the separator to Tab. Text files are read as UTF-8, so save a CSV as UTF-8 if accents look wrong. If "Deck name" is empty, it takes the file name without its extension.
• Name the deck, and keep the name when you update it. "Deck name" takes up to 120 characters and defaults to "My deck". Type Spanish::Verbs to create a sub-deck. The downloaded file is named after the deck, with :: shown as " - ", the characters \ / : * ? " < > | replaced by _ and the name cut to 80 characters. The deck's ID comes from its name, and each note's ID from the deck name, the card type and the front text. Import the corrected list again with the same name and card type and Anki updates the matching cards; a changed front, name or type makes new cards.

Common problems and how to fix them

It says "No cards yet: each line needs a front and a back. Check the separator above."

The list has text, but no line split into two non-empty parts. The usual cause is a separator that does not occur in the lines: a dash without spaces around it, or columns divided only by spaces. Open "Front and back are separated by" and try Tab, Comma or another choice until the count line shows cards. If "First row is a header" is ticked and the list is one line long, that line is removed. The download button stays disabled at 0 cards.

It says "2 lines have no back side and will be left out." (with your own number)

Those lines produced only one non-empty cell. Common causes are a title or note line in the list, a line where the separator is missing, and a line where one side was left empty. The other lines still go into the deck. Add the missing side or delete the line, and the message disappears.

The backs look cut short and the Tags column has extra words.

The separator is a comma (or semicolon), and the back contains that character without quotes, so the line was split into more than two cells. The text after the second separator became the tags. Put the definition in double quotes in the source, or export with tabs, as Quizlet and an Excel copy do. A dash, equals or colon separator splits only once, so these never create tags.

It says "This file could not be read. Save it as CSV or paste the two columns instead."

Reading the file or its first sheet failed. For a workbook that means the file could not be parsed, for example a damaged or protected one. Open it in a spreadsheet program, copy the two columns and paste them into the box, or save a copy as CSV and drop that. A Word file or PDF is refused earlier with a message such as "words.docx is a DOCX file, which this tool can't open."

It says "The deck could not be built. Try again, or split a very long list into two decks."

Writing the deck failed while the database and archive were being made in the page. Press the download button again first. If the list is very long, divide it between two decks, for example by naming them Spanish::Part 1 and Spanish::Part 2 as sub-decks, and import both. Any other failure in this step shows the same message.

How it compares

Anki can import a text or CSV file by itself, with its own choices for fields, note types and tags. This tool does the formatting before the file reaches Anki: you get a finished .apkg that opens in Anki, AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile, and you see the cards first. It makes only Front and Back cards, with three card types and a fixed layout. It has no pictures, audio, cloze deletions or HTML: angle brackets and ampersands are shown as typed, and line breaks are kept. It does not read your existing Anki collection or change decks you already have. In exchange, nothing needs installing, and the list is turned into a deck in your browser and not uploaded.