How to Make Flashcards From GoodNotes: 4 Ways
GoodNotes has a built-in flashcard feature: create a new notebook, pick the Flashcards template, write a question on the front and an answer on the back, then study the deck with spaced repetition. That works well if you are writing cards fresh. If you already have twenty pages of handwritten lecture notes and want cards out of them, GoodNotes has no conversion step, so you either retype them by hand, export the pages and feed them to another tool, or study them somewhere else entirely.
This piece compares the four realistic routes and says plainly which one fits which situation.
The four methods at a glance
| Method | Setup time | Handwriting support | Best when |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoodNotes built-in flashcards | Minutes | You write the cards yourself | You want cards and notes in one app |
| Retype into Quizlet or Anki | 30-90 min per chapter | Manual, you read and type | You want a shareable, portable deck |
| Export to PDF, then use an AI tool | 5-10 min | Depends on the tool's OCR | You have many pages and little time |
| Photograph the pages with a study app | 1-2 min per page | On-device text recognition | The notes are handwritten and stay on your phone |
Method 1: GoodNotes' own flashcard notebooks
Open a new notebook, choose the Flashcards template group, and you get a front/back card layout. Write the prompt on the front page, the answer on the back, then tap Study to review the deck. GoodNotes schedules cards using a spaced repetition algorithm and tracks which ones you keep missing.
The strengths are real. Cards live next to the notebooks they came from. You can draw diagrams on a card, which no text-based flashcard tool handles gracefully, and for anatomy, organic chemistry mechanisms or circuit schematics that matters a lot.
The limit is that nothing converts your existing notes. Every card is one you sit down and write. If your notes are already dense, you are effectively rewriting the chapter.
Method 2: Retype into Quizlet or Anki
This is the slowest method and the one most students actually use, because the destination apps are good. Quizlet gives you a clean study mode, Learn mode, and shared decks. Anki gives you the most-tuned spaced repetition scheduler available and unlimited customization.
Practically: open GoodNotes on one side of the screen, the flashcard app on the other, and type. In Quizlet you can paste bulk text with a term/definition separator, which is faster than filling in cards one at a time. Anki has the same idea via File, Import with a comma or tab separator.
The hidden benefit is that typing forces you to decide what each card should ask, and that decision is most of the learning. The cost is time, and time is the reason half-finished decks exist on every student's phone. If you go this route, how to add notes to Quizlet walks through the paste-import format in detail.
Method 3: Export to PDF, then run it through an AI tool
GoodNotes exports a notebook or a page range as PDF or image. Share, Export, choose PDF, and you have a file you can hand to a tool that generates questions from it.
The catch is handwriting. Most PDF-based tools were built for typed documents. If your GoodNotes pages are typed text or imported lecture slides, extraction is usually clean and this becomes the fastest method by a wide margin. If the pages are your own handwriting, GoodNotes' PDF export does embed a recognized text layer when handwriting recognition is enabled for that notebook, but the quality varies with how tidy your script is, and cursive or heavily abbreviated notes come out garbled often enough that you should check the output before trusting a deck built from it.
Test this with three pages before you export a whole semester.
Method 4: Photograph the page instead of exporting it
If the notes are handwritten, skipping the export entirely is often simpler. Apps that read a photo of a page recognize handwriting directly, which sidesteps whatever GoodNotes did or did not embed in the PDF layer.
This is what Qora does: you photograph the page, and it turns the material into a short sectioned lesson plus questions built from that page, multiple choice, fill in the blank, written answer and open recall. Text recognition happens on the device, so the photo itself never leaves your phone; only the extracted text is sent to build the lesson. There is no account, and the notes stay on the device. It is worth knowing that Qora produces questions rather than a two-sided card deck, so if you specifically want cards you can share with a classmate, Quizlet is the better destination. Turning notes into flashcards covers the broader version of this decision.
Which one to pick
Pick GoodNotes' built-in flashcards when you are studying a subject with diagrams and you want everything in one app. Pick retyping into Quizlet or Anki when the deck needs to outlive the semester or be shared. Pick PDF export plus an AI tool when your notes are typed or imported slides. Pick photographing pages when the notes are handwritten and you want questions fast.
One thing worth saying regardless of method: the format matters less than whether you are actually retrieving. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiments, students who spent study time being tested on material remembered substantially more a week later than students who spent the same time rereading, even though the rereading group felt more confident. Any of these four methods puts you in the retrieval condition. Choosing between them is a question of how much of your evening you want to spend on setup.
Where every method falls short
None of these fix bad source notes. If your GoodNotes pages are a wall of transcribed lecture sentences with nothing marked as important, every method downstream produces cards that ask you to recall filler. Automated tools are worse here than you are, because they cannot tell which line the professor said would be on the exam.
Handwriting recognition also degrades in predictable places: chemical formulas with subscripts, mathematical notation, diagrams with labels, and anything you abbreviated in a way only you understand. For a page of equations, retyping is not the slow option, it is the only one that works.
And spaced repetition rewards consistency more than card quality. A mediocre deck reviewed daily beats an immaculate one opened twice.
Common questions
Does GoodNotes have flashcards built in?
Yes. GoodNotes includes flashcard templates and a study mode with spaced repetition. You create a notebook from a flashcard template, write the question on the front page and the answer on the back, then use the study feature to review. It does not convert existing notes into cards automatically.
Can GoodNotes convert my handwritten notes into flashcards automatically?
No. There is no feature that reads a page of notes and generates cards from it. You either write the cards yourself in a flashcard notebook, or export the pages and use a separate tool that generates questions from the exported content.
How do I export GoodNotes notes to Quizlet?
There is no direct integration. The practical route is to export the notebook as a PDF or copy recognized text out of GoodNotes, then format it as term and definition pairs and use Quizlet's bulk import, which accepts pasted text with a chosen separator between the term and the definition and between rows.
Is GoodNotes' flashcard feature as good as Anki?
For scheduling, Anki is more capable and more configurable, and it has decades of tuning behind its algorithm. GoodNotes wins on handwriting and diagrams, since you can draw a card the way you drew the original note. If you are studying visual material and already live in GoodNotes, the convenience usually outweighs the scheduling difference.
The honest summary: GoodNotes is a strong place to write flashcards and a weak place to convert notes into them, because that conversion step does not exist. Decide first whether you need shareable cards or just want to be quizzed. If it is the former, budget an evening for retyping into Quizlet or Anki. If it is the latter, take three of your messiest handwritten pages and run them through one photo-based tool this week, then check whether the questions it produced are ones you would actually have written yourself.