Study guides

Practical help for getting your course material into a chatbot and studying with it.

• Hitting ChatGPT's file upload limit? How to get a week of course files in anyway

  Which limit you hit, and how to fit a whole week of slides and readings into one upload, or none.

• Combine slides, PDFs and Word docs into one file for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini

  Three ways to turn a folder of course files into one document, and which to use when.

• How to study a week of lectures with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini

  Gather the files, turn them into one document, and use prompts that make the chatbot quiz and explain instead of just summarising.

• What to do with scanned PDFs and photos of slides

  How to tell whether a PDF has real text, and four ways to get the words out when it doesn't.

• Paste or attach? Getting long notes into a chatbot

  Why long pastes get cut off, how to check what the chatbot actually read, and how to split a big batch.

• How to summarize lecture slides with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini

  Why chatbots misread slide decks, what a converted deck looks like, and prompts that explain the lecture instead of just listing its headings.

• Make flashcards and practice exams from your lecture notes

  Prompts for flashcards and practice tests built from your own notes, how to get the cards into Anki, and how to catch wrong or too-easy questions.

• PDF to Markdown: turn a PDF reading into clean text for ChatGPT

  What a text layer is and how to check for one, what conversion keeps and loses (headings, tables, footnotes, equations), and five minutes of clean-up.

• How to give ChatGPT an Excel or CSV file, and why tables break

  Reading a table versus calculating with it, what merged cells, formulas, wide tables and semicolon CSVs turn into, and a checklist before you convert.

• ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or NotebookLM: which suits your course files

  Chatting with a document versus a notebook of sources: what to compare, which suits which study job, and how one text file works with all of them.