Flashcard Lab Takes the Tedium Out of Making Study Materials

Flashcard Lab setup is almost too easy

Knowing Flashcard Lab was designed to work with Google Sheets, I logged in for the first time using my Google account rather than my Apple ID. I was taken to a nearly-blank white screen that prompted me to "Create a New Sheet." I wasn't sure what that would do, since I assumed the setup would be more involved, but I gamely typed in the words "states and capitals" (my placeholder topic for testing study apps).

My computer was in front of me at the time, open to my Google Sheets. I watched as a new sheet, named "states and capitals," appeared in my Google Drive. I pasted a list of states and capitals into the first two columns of the new spreadsheet. Back on my phone, I pressed the button in the mobile app prompting me to "review" my topic and was instantly served up 10 cards with state names on one side and their capitals on the other.

You can customize your cards—a bit

Simple is the watchword here. Some flashcard apps let you add all kinds of formatting and audio to your cards, use AI to generate custom decks, or play games as a way to review. Flashcard Lab isn't nearly so ambitious. It exists simply to turn the rows and columns of a spreadsheet into flashcards.

One thing the app does have in common with its competitors is that it gives you the option of digging through a library of pre-existing, user-generated decks, which you access by tapping the hamburger menu on the bottom right and hitting "Browse Flashcards." Doing so opens a mobile browser tab with a few options, like "500 GRE Vocabulary Words for Flashcards" and "Guitar Chord Flashcards." You can share your own decks with this library from within your source Google Sheet by hitting "Share" and sharing the sheet with [email protected].

Other customization options are thin on the ground. You can include photos and images in your sheets so they appear on your flashcards and, by hitting the gear icon on the bottom left corner of your screen, you can can toggle on dark mode, randomize the order your cards are presented in, reverse the cards so you see the content of the second Sheets column on the front instead of the first, and study with spaced repetition.

I talk about spaced repetition, or the Leitner method, a lot. Stated simply, it's a technique of sorting your cards as you review them so you go over the material you know well less frequently, and study the content you struggle to grasp more often. The best flashcard apps all use this method, and you employ it in Flashcard Lab by indicating, after you flip a card, whether you found answering the question easy, medium-hard, or hard. That tells the app how often to show you that card going forward.

It's all about Google Sheets

After I toggled on the spaced repetition and randomized order options, I started on a set of 10 cards from my "states and capitals" sheet, which I also had open on the computer in front of me. As I moved through the cards, flipping them over and then indicating whether I found recalling the answer easy or hard, I noticed some movement in my peripheral vision. I glanced at the screen and saw that in Column F, the app was editing my Google Sheet with formulas: {"difficultyIndex":1,"dueDate":1743090740991}

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

It turns out Flashcard Lab uses the Google Sheet you provide to do pretty much everything—even the coding it relies on to determine how often to show you a particular card. I am by no means a coder, but I find this extremely cool.

I am, however, a states-and-capitals whiz, and I made the mistake of answering "easy" every time the app prompted me to declare how much difficulty I had with the cards in my deck. I tried to redo my review of the deck so I could see what the code looked like when I pressed "hard," but discovered found I was limited by my free trial. Without paying, you can only study 10 cards with spaced repetition.

The best features will cost you

That brings me to the dreaded payment portion of the review. Yes, you have to pay to access Flashcard Lab's best features. For free, you can access 600 GRE vocab words, review or print up to 20 flashcards per deck, add up to five images per deck, and manually add cards to a "forgotten" set for re-review. A one-time payment of $10.99 bumps you up to the "Elite" tier, which gives you access to all those toggle-able features found in Settings.

Once you're an Elite, you can review and print unlimited flashcards per deck, add as many images as you want, and study with spaced repetition as much as you want, plus customize the intervals at which you study using that method. (That means you can decide if the app shows you your problem cards every two days, three days, or however long you choose, making it ideal for preparing for a test days or weeks in the future.)

There's also another paid tier, Scholar—$13.98 every two months, $23.96 every four, or $47.88 per year—that gives you everything from Elite, plus the ability to use AI to create 35 flashcard decks sourced from PDFs. You can upload up to 25 source PDF files of up to 60MB each.

A good no-frills choice