I’m wondering if anyone has figured out a way to import powerpoint presentations to create quick image flashcards? Or any workaround ideas without copying each slide as it’s own picture? Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Here is a trick that might help other newbies like me when trying to take notes from someone else’s powerpoint.
I often add slides to my RemNote meeting notes while I’m in Zoom when someone is sharing their screen. I’m not importing a whole PP as you are asking, but for purposes of notetaking this technique has advantages. Sometimes I don’t need the PP image, just the text, so I run OCR on it first. I can generally keep up with the meeting (i.e. do it all in real time).
The free program I use is ShareX. It is a fantasically powerful little screen capture utility that makes a great companion to Anki and RemNote. I’ll warn you it takes some study to learn it, but it is worth the effort. It launches with a hotkey. I set the “after capture tasks” as follows:
- Copy image to clipboard (then you can just paste into RemNote)
- Save image to file (sometimes I want to go back to crop or mark it up then re-paste to RemNote)
- Recognize text/OCR. I have it set to automatically do OCR, even though I don’t always use it for a given capture (I can quickly cancel the OCR window if I don’t need it). If I DO want the text (which I often do with PowerPoints), I simply highlight the text in the OCR window and paste that into RemNote instead of the PP graphic clip.
Here is what my ShareX setup looks like.
Here is an example of a PowerPoint page capture:
But there aren’t any diagrams or any pictures I need, so I just paste the OCR result instead:
Firs8Steps (Adrian Jacobs)
As in any recovery from debilitating socio-cultural
problems the journey begins with, “Hello, my name is, I
have a problem…” I am proposing that Aboriginal
culture, worldview, frame of reference, and in this case,
Aboriginal Christianity offers hope to Western
missionary autism.* Aboriginal people are not your
problem, we are your cure.
a tendency to view life in terms of one’s own needs and desires.
(as you can see, it requires a bit of clean-up as with any OCR).
One big advantage to using ShareX screen capture in Anki and RemNote is that the resulting image file is a reasonable size. My old Anki media folders were too bloated when I downloaded images off the internet (now I screen capture them off my browser window instead). PowerPoint, in particular, can easily have bloated files with images that are unecessarily high in resolution.
Another trick I regularly do is making RemNote flashcards of people’s faces while I’m in Zoom meetings so I can learn names. During the meeting, I insert a quick reference [[person’s name then Ctrl+Enter.
Then I click on the reference, add :: and paste their image, and back arrow back to my meeting notes. Now every time I reference this person I get a little pop up reminder of what they look like (and they are in my queue).
That’s so helpful - thank you! Love the creative work-around. I didn’t realize it was possible to capture PowerPoint text like that either!
Once PDF support arrives this should be a comfortable solution given the powerpoint does not contain too many animations and can be converted cleanly.
Right now you have to use images I think.
Thanks for the reply! Do you know if PDF support is in the pipeline formally?
This is a much requested feature and very valuable for students (which is the target group of the app) so I think it has a high priority on their roadmap.
I agree! It would be hugely helpful for students who want to consolidate all their main study resources into RemNote. Crossing my fingers!
Convert the PowerPoint presentation to pdf, then copy from there.