What happend to the OpenOffice impress extension OpenCards?

We’ve retired it in favor of a revised OpenCards approach, that uses PowerPoint files and ships as stand-alone application instead of being an extension.

Is there similar flashcard memorization software available for PowerPoint ppt-files?

We did an exhaustive review of flashcard learning applications, but as far as we know, there is no comparable software available that allows users to use PowerPoint files as flashcard sets. However, there are many other flashcard memorzation tools available that use custom flashcard files. So if you don’t like OpenCards give a try to Anki or Mnemosyne.


Can I use files with the suffix pptx as flashcard sets for OpenCards?

Not yet. Files with this suffix use a newer/different file format that has been introduced with Office 2007. The workaround for now is to simply save your pptx files as ppt in PowerPoint (which you can do by clicking “Save as…” in the file menu and by selecting ppt as output format.

The good news is, that we’re working on this issue and OpenCards will support pptx-files in the future. The actual date depends on the progress of Apache POI, which OpenCards uses internally to open ppt-files and extract information from them.

I have some OpenOffice impress presentations, which I would like to use as flashcard sets ? Do I need to recreate them completely from scratch in order to use OpenCards ?

You can save ppt-files with OpenOffice. So just go ahaed and save the odp-files you would like to memorize with OpenCards as PowerPoint (ppt) file. Next, you can add them to a category in the OpenCards category view.

Do I need Microsoft PowerPoint/Office to use OpenCards?

No. OpenCards is a stand-application that just reads ppt-files. This means, you can even use OpenCards under Linux, where PowerPoint is not available. Just use LibreOffice/OpenOffice to create flashcards sets (which you need to save as ppt  instead of odp.

OpenOffice is free as it is OpenCards, and it’s just a snap to get both running on your system right today.

I’ve tried ’Import flashcards’ to import some flashcards. Nothing happened. Why?

OpenCards can only import CSV-files with two tab-separated columns currently. No matter what kind of flashcard software you’ve used before, in most cases you should be able to transform your flashcards into such a format (via the export function of your previously used flashcard software). Try to download and import this  example-file to see how it works. OpenCards attempts to guess the used character encoding automatically, so you should not have to worry about it.

How can I copy my presentations to another computer without losing the last learn-session state ?

Just go ahead. OpenCards stores all your learn session information within a (hidden) subfolder named ‘.opencards’. If you copy this folder along with your files you can easily migrate your data. You can even sync your cardsets using DropBox.

How can I preserve the category tree when migrating to a new computer ?

OpenCards stores the category tree (inlcuding the locations of the card-files attached to the categories) in the file

/Users/yourname/.opencards/OpenCards.tree

Under Windows this will be

C:\Users\yourname\.opencards\OpenCards.tree

To transfer the category tree just copy the file to the appropriate location on your new computer.

If the location of the files has changed you can try to edit the file manually because it is plain xml.

You can also specify a custom save-location for the category tree in the OpenCards preferences (‘Advanced’-tab).