Anki Deck Reverse Cards

Anki Help
1

Hello,

I have Anki Deck but I want to copy all the cards and make them into a new deck so that the cards are show in Reversed order. eg. current deck front side of cards is A and answer side is B. I want it to show B as front side and A as answer side.

I looked at some pages on how to do this, but I am wondering how I can copy the whole deck and reverse all the cards at once instead of making a whole new deck from scratch.

Thanks.

2

You don’t need to copy anything. You just need to give your note type instructions to make that 2nd card for all of your notes.

The ways to do that depend on how “custom” your note type already is, and whether there are any other notes that use this note type that you don’t want to create a 2nd card for. You can –

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3

Hello,

Thank you for the reply.

I used basic card type, and most cards in my deck use that card type and I do not want the change to affect all the decks, so when I tried to flip the card method (from the video link - Add a 2nd card type/flip it over) it said the change will affect pretty much all my cards I have.

So in this case, will I have to recreate all the cards?

Thanks

4

No – this is where Anki shines! You should pretty much never have to recreate your work.

Since you used “Basic” – you can just switch these cards to the “Basic (and reversed card)” note type.

  1. Make sure all of your devices are completely in sync.
  2. In the Browse window, select the cards/notes that you want to apply this change to.
  3. Notes > Change Note Type
  4. On the right, set the new note type to “Basic (and reversed card)” – make sure everything lines up like you want and Save

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5

Thanks! I will try this.

Before I start, should I export the current deck? As I imagine it would reverse this whole deck and I would like to have a recall and recognition deck for what I am doing.

6

Nope, that shouldn’t be necessary. If you’re concerned, before making big changes is always a great time to make a manual backup just in case – File > Create Backup. But nothing is going to change about the cards you’ve already been studying.

If you take a few minutes to understand what Anki does with note types, notes, card types, and cards, I think it will make more sense.

What I just gave you instructions for is how you tell Anki – instead of making 1 card from each of these notes, I want you to make 2 cards, and for the 2nd one you should follow the instructions you already have for a “reversed” card. That’s it.

As you can see in the screenshot, your current Card 1’s will stay Card 1’s under the new note type. You said you were using the default note type, so they will match, they will still have all of their study history, and you won’t notice any difference. The Card 2’s will be created new.

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