Import Questions Into Kahoot: Spreadsheet Import Guide

How do you import questions into Kahoot?

Kahoot imports questions from a spreadsheet. Download Kahoot's .xlsx template, fill in the Question column, the Answer 1 to Answer 4 columns, a Time limit, and the Correct answer(s) column, then in the Kahoot creator select Add question, choose Import, and pick Import spreadsheet at the bottom. Upload the file and Kahoot builds the cards. Only quiz questions can be imported, each question needs at least two answers and at least one correct answer, and the file has to be .xlsx from Excel 2007 or newer and under 1MB.

That is the whole mechanism. The rest of this guide is the detail that decides whether your import lands cleanly the first time: the exact columns, a character limit that Kahoot's own two sources disagree about, the answer key format that trips almost everyone up, and what to do when the questions do not exist yet.

The template, column by column

Kahoot links the template from its help article, and the file is worth reading before you start typing, because it carries its own instructions in the first few rows. The columns, in order:

Column	What it holds	Required
Question	The question stem, one question per row	Yes
Answer 1	First answer option	Yes
Answer 2	Second answer option	Yes, two answers is the minimum
Answer 3	Third answer option	No
Answer 4	Fourth answer option	No
Time limit	Seconds allowed to answer	Effectively yes, see below
Correct answer(s)	The answer numbers that are correct	Yes, at least one

Four answer options is the ceiling. If your source quiz has five or six options per question, you are cutting before you import, not after.

The character limits, and the discrepancy worth knowing about

This is the part that generates the most failed imports, and Kahoot's own documentation gives two different answers.

The help article states that questions have a limit of 95 characters and answers a limit of 60. The template file that the same article links to states, in its own instruction row, that questions have a limit of 120 characters and answers can have 75 characters max.

Both are first-party. Rather than guess which one the validator actually enforces, write to the lower pair: 95 characters for a question, 60 for an answer, spaces included. Anything that passes at 95 and 60 passes under either rule, and you never have to find out the hard way with a room full of people waiting.

The limit is tighter than it sounds. Ninety five characters is roughly fifteen words. A question written out of a recorded training session tends to run twice that, because it carries the setup before it gets to the ask. Trimming is not a workaround here, it is the correct edit: Kahoot is built for a question that gets read off a projected screen and answered in twenty seconds.

Time limit and the answer key: the two fields people get wrong

Time limit only accepts six values: 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, or 120 seconds. Anything else, or a blank cell, does not fail the import. Kahoot quietly sets that question to 20 seconds. That is a friendly default and a silent one, so if you meant to give people two minutes on a calculation question, check the cell rather than trusting the upload.

Correct answer(s) takes answer numbers, not letters and not the answer text. You write 1 if the first answer is correct. If a question genuinely has more than one right answer, you list them comma separated, like 2,3.

That number format is where most conversions break. Nearly every other quiz tool marks the key with a letter, so a quiz exported from somewhere else arrives with A, B, C, D in that column and every row fails or imports wrong. The mapping is trivial once you know it applies: A becomes 1, B becomes 2, C becomes 3, D becomes 4.

Converting a quiz you already have into the template

If your questions exist as a CSV from another tool, the work is column mapping rather than retyping. A typical export carries a question, four options, a correct answer letter, and often an explanation. Here is how that lands:

Typical export column	Kahoot template column	What you change
Question	Question	Trim to 95 characters
Option A to Option D	Answer 1 to Answer 4	Trim each to 60 characters
Correct Answer (A/B/C/D)	Correct answer(s)	Convert the letter to a number
Explanation	No column exists	Keep it in your own copy
Timestamp or source reference	No column exists	Keep it in your own copy
Question number, type	Not used	Drop the columns
Nothing	Time limit	Add it, one of the six allowed values

Two things do not survive: explanations and any reference back to the source. Kahoot's template has no column for either. If those matter to you, and for compliance or certification content they usually do, keep the fuller version of the quiz somewhere else and treat the kahoot as the live performance rather than the record.

One format note. The importer reads .xlsx only. It will not take a CSV, a Word file, or a PDF. If you are working in Google Sheets, Numbers, or LibreOffice, that is fine, you just export to .xlsx before uploading.

Is there a way to import questions into Kahoot without a spreadsheet?

Not in bulk. The spreadsheet importer is the only documented way to add many questions at once. Everything else means typing cards in the creator one at a time: the stem, the answer options, the correct one, the timer, then the next card. For five questions that is fine. For thirty it is an afternoon.

The spreadsheet route has a second advantage that has nothing to do with speed. A grid is reviewable. A subject matter expert who will never log into a quiz tool will happily read a spreadsheet and mark the two rows that are wrong. When a wrong answer key has real consequences, that review step is worth more than the minutes saved.

Can you export questions from Kahoot?

Not in the same shape. Kahoot lets you download results and reports as a spreadsheet after a game, which tells you how people answered, question by question and player by player. That is a results file, not a question file, and there is no documented export that hands your questions back in the .xlsx layout the importer accepts.

Treat the import as one directional and keep your own master copy of the questions. If your quiz only ever existed inside Kahoot, rebuilding it elsewhere later means retyping it.

Can you import Quizlet into Kahoot?

There is no direct route between the two. Quizlet sets are flashcards, which are term and definition pairs rather than questions with four options and a marked key, so even a clean export does not map onto Kahoot's template without a rewrite. In practice you would export the set, then build a question stem and three plausible wrong answers for each term by hand.

Writing plausible wrong answers is the slow part of that job, and it is the part that decides whether the quiz teaches anything. An option nobody would ever pick is a wasted slot.

What if the questions do not exist yet?

Everything above assumes you already have a quiz and the job is moving it. Often the real situation is that a session was recorded, somebody needs a knowledge check on it, and nothing is written.

In that case the spreadsheet is still the right destination, you just fill it from the recording rather than by hand. A Kahoot quiz maker that reads the video drafts the stems, four options, and the marked answer in one pass, which lands you in the grid ready for the trim and the answer key conversion. The editing pass is still real work, because generated questions are a strong first draft rather than a guarantee, but it is reviewing twenty questions instead of writing them.

This is the common shape for recorded lectures, onboarding sessions, product walkthroughs, and recorded webinars. It is not limited to internal training either. Teams whose customer onboarding runs on recorded walkthroughs use the same check to confirm the walkthrough actually landed before a support ticket proves it did not.

When the import fails: a checklist

• A question was skipped. The stem or one of its answers is over the character limit. Check against 95 and 60 first.
• A row was rejected. It has fewer than two answers, or no correct answer marked.
• Every question came in at 20 seconds. The Time limit column is blank or holds a value outside 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, and 120.
• The right answers are wrong. The Correct answer(s) column holds letters or answer text instead of answer numbers.
• The file was rejected outright. It is not .xlsx, it is older than Excel 2007, or it is over 1MB.
• Only some questions imported. Kahoot offers to continue without the problematic questions when it finds errors. If you clicked through, count the cards. That option is why an import can look successful and be twelve questions short.

Kahoot checks the file before committing anything and gives you the choice to go back and fix the errors or continue without the failed rows. Going back is almost always the right call.

Where Kahoot fits, and where it does not

Kahoot is strong when people are present at the same time. The timer and the leaderboard do genuine work on attention during a class, a training day, or a conference session, and the tight character limits push you toward questions that work in that format.

It is thinner as a system of record. If the question is whether every employee completed a compliance module and passed it, you want scores tied to a person, landing in a gradebook, and still retrievable in two years. That is an LMS job, and a quiz can be exported as a QTI package that imports as a native LMS quiz instead. When you simply need responses collected and scored quietly rather than played, a Google Forms quiz is the lighter option, and Microsoft Forms takes an import too, though through a document converter rather than a spreadsheet.

Plenty of teams use two of these at once. Write the questions once, send the fast version to Kahoot for the room, and the tracked version wherever the record has to live.

The short version

Kahoot imports questions from an .xlsx spreadsheet using its own template, through Add question, Import, Import spreadsheet in the creator. Columns are Question, Answer 1 to Answer 4, Time limit, and Correct answer(s). Write questions to 95 characters and answers to 60, since Kahoot's help article and its template file disagree and those are the safe numbers. Give every row at least two answers and at least one correct answer, set the time limit to 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, or 120 seconds, and mark the key with answer numbers rather than letters. Keep the file under 1MB. Explanations and source references have no column and stay in your own copy. And if the quiz has not been written yet and the source is a recording, generating the questions straight into that grid skips both the writing and the reshaping.