When practicing flashcards from your Global Queue, RemNote shows due flashcards from all of your notes, but sometimes you may want to pick a specific topic or group of cards to practice. There are several ways to accomplish this.
Practicing flashcards from a document or folder
When not using the Global Queue, you will typically practice flashcards directly from a document or folder, as these serve as the primary organizational units for grouping and organizing your flashcards in RemNote.
From the Editor
You can practice the flashcards in a specific document or folder you’ve zoomed in to using the practice button in the upper-right corner (this button appears once you’ve added at least one flashcard). You can click the main button to practice with spaced repetition, or the drop-down arrow for other options.
See the section about Practice Modes further below for details on the differences between them.
From the Flashcard Home
You can also use the Practice button next to any document shown in the Flashcard Home, or by selecting one of your recently practiced documents in the Jump Back In section:
From the Cards Table
The Cards Table is where you can see all of your flashcards in a single place. You can access it by going to Flashcard Home and selecting the Cards tab.
Here you can practice any selection of flashcards you desire using the various filters available. Only the filtered due cards will be included in the Practice Queue.
Example: in the image below, filtering for cards that are Enabled and that contain the word “DNA” resulted in 4 flashcards:
By selecting the Practice button, you can choose to Practice with Spaced Repetition, which will only include the due cards among the ones filtered (in this case, only 3 of the 4 cards are due at the moment), or to Practice All Cards.
You can also access the Card Table for a specific document or folder. To do that, select the document or folder from the list in Flashcard Home.
You can also access the card table of a specific document from the Editor. To do that, select the Card Table option from the drop-down menu of the Practice button or from the Flashcards menu within the Document Menu (the … button on the top-right corner of the document).
Practicing from the Document Sidebar
You can quickly start practicing flashcards from a specific document or folder that is on your sidebar. To do that, right-click on the document you want to practice, select Flashcards, and then choose your preferred practice mode.
You can also do this on the mobile app. On the Document Sidebar, tap the … button on the document you want to practice, select Flashcards, and then choose your preferred practice mode.
Practicing other sets of flashcards
RemNote offers multiple ways for you to practice specific selections of flashcards from your notes so you can choose the one that best fits your needs and note-taking style!
From a normal Rem
If you prefer, you can find the same options under the Flashcards menu within the Document Menu (… button in the upper-right corner of the document). This is accessible in any Rem you are zoomed in to, even ones that are not documents or folders.
From a tag
One way to practice a set of flashcards that are not all in the same document is to tag them, or any of their parent Rems. In other words, tagging a Rem will include all of its flashcards in the tag's practice queue.
To practice Rems from a tag, zoom into that Rem and select any of the practice options. If the tag is not a document you can still practice from it by selecting the … menu in the upper-right corner and selecting one of the practice options there.
Example: By tagging the cards A and B with a Rem called T, the flashcard from A, the flashcard from B, and all cards that are descendants of B got included in the practice queue of T.
Note that this method only works for cards tagged with a Rem. If a Rem is referenced in a flashcard instead, then that flashcard will not be included in the practice queue of that Rem.
From a table with filters
You can filter a table view to only show specific rows based on certain conditions. If a table view is filtered, only flashcards from the visible rows will be included when practicing the document where it is located.
Example: The table view below is filtered to only show “Chemical Elements” that have “Gas” selected in the “phase at STP” property. So, when practicing the Gaseous Elements document, only flashcards about the gaseous elements will be shown in the practice queue.
That match some other criteria (portals and search portals)
If you don't want to tag a bunch of things just to practice them once or twice, and the cards you want don’t divide cleanly across documents, you can portal any set of Rems into a new document to include their flashcards into that document.
You'll most often want to use a search portal, but this works with standard portals too. For instance, here's how you can study all flashcards that contain the text “text”:
Important: only flashcards that are visible in the portal will be shown in the practice queue. This makes it easy to select only the relevant flashcards in the document where the portal is located by only expanding the desired Rems.
For example, even though the Class Notes document shown below has two flashcards, only the single visible flashcard nested in Cards I want to see will be included when practicing Document with a portal. The flashcards hidden under Cards I don’t want to see due to it being collapsed are not included.
If you have a lot of Rems collapsed within the portal that you do want to see, and need to quickly expand them again, you can expand all descendants of a single Rem by putting your cursor in that Rem and pressing Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow (Cmd+Shift+Down Arrow on a Mac), or by the /expand all descendants command. You can also do this on multiple Rems at the same time by selecting them all before using the shortcut or the /-command.
In case you want to just include all of the flashcards from one document into another and don’t want its contents to be visible, it is better to use the method detailed in the section further below about practicing “From several selected documents (Rems added as a Source)”.
From a portal as an Embedded Queue
If you already have a portal handy that contains the flashcards you want to practice, you can turn it into an embedded queue and practice its due cards from that portal directly in the editor.
To do this, select Turn into Embedded Queue from the 6-dot menu in the portal's breadcrumb, then select Switch to View Mode.
Note that search portals cannot be turned into embedded queues. However, you can convert a search portal into a standard portal by selecting Turn into Portal from its breadcrumb (of course, this will prevent it from updating automatically in the future).
From several selected documents (Rems added as sources)
Maybe you want to practice a collection of cards from multiple documents that don’t share a common ancestor folder or tag, or you may want to include all cards from one document into another, but don't want all of its contents to be visible there.
In this case, you should create a new document and link the ones you want to practice as sources. When practicing this new document all flashcards from its sources will be included in the queue.
The easiest way to add a document as a source is to select Upload at the top of your new document, select the Link tab, and search for and add the documents that have the flashcards you want to practice:
You can also accomplish this by copying and pasting a Rem into another one and selecting Source from the paste menu:
From annotated PDFs, web pages, and other files
You can create flashcards directly from your uploaded PDFs, slides presentations or any other of our supported file types using the RemNote Reader. You can also annotate and create flashcards from web pages using our Web Reader.
After uploading or linking a PDF, supported file, or web page to a Rem, all of the flashcards created on its annotations will be included in the practice queue of that Rem.
You can also link the same file or web page to multiple Rems to include its flashcards in multiple places. You can do that with the same method detailed in the “From several selected documents (Rems added as sources)” section, but instead of searching for a document you will search for the file’s name. Note, however, that each file can only have one Default Document, which will always be the Rem in which you uploaded the file (the Default Document is the one that will be opened on the left of the Reader when selecting “Toggle Default Document”).
More details on flashcard gathering rules
The previous sections covered most ways in which you can select cards to include in the practice queue of a specific document, folder, or Rem. In most cases, this will just work and you won’t have to think about it at all, but if you’re encountering a situation where cards you expect to appear are not appearing, or cards you don’t expect to appear are appearing, then this detailed list of card gathering rules should help you understand what is going on.
Flashcards practice modes
When practicing specific flashcards, you can choose from three practice options:
Practice with Spaced Repetition shows cards that are currently due for review based on your past performance.
Practice All Flashcards shows all flashcards in the document in a random order, regardless of whether they're currently due for review. When using this mode, your performance will be taken into account to decide when these cards will become due – but if you're practicing a card earlier than you normally would have, RemNote will take this into account and not reschedule those cards too far off in the future. For example, Practicing all cards in a document ten times in a row, won't increase the next time until you see the cards again more than studying them once would.
Practice All Flashcards in Order shows all flashcards in the order that they appear in the document, regardless of whether they're currently due for review. Also, exactly like in Practice All, your performance will be taken into account to decide when these cards will become due – but if you're practicing a card earlier than you normally would have, RemNote will take this into account and not reschedule those cards too far off in the future.
Practicing All in Order is a Pro-only feature.
Caution: There are two additional things you should keep in mind about practicing cards in order:
First, don't abuse in-order practice! Random order is a more effective study tool in most cases, for two reasons: first, it ensures that you don't end up remembering a card only because of its surrounding context (which you likely won't have in the real world). And second, it doesn't use spaced repetition; it can't, because to be able to freely schedule harder cards more often than easier cards, RemNote needs the ability to reorder the cards.
But there are cases where in-order practice is helpful. For instance, if you've just created a document and want to quickly review what's in it for the first time, practicing the document in order makes sense.Second, when multiple flashcards are generated from the same Rem – say, a forward card and a backward card – first all of the first flashcards are shown in order, then all of the second flashcards are shown in order, and so on. That's because otherwise, it would be trivially easy to answer the flashcards after the first. For example, if you had a card asking what the French word for “hello” was, and immediately after answering “bonjour” you had a card asking what the English word for “bonjour” was, you wouldn't be getting much useful practice out of that second card.