To move Cards or Notes from one Deck to another Deck:
- Select the Note(s) (or Card(s) if you want to call them that - WRONG: there’s actually 2 different views, Notes (green) and Cards (blue):
)
- Right click one of the selected Notes/Cards and pick the Cards submenu
- Pick Change Deck…
- In the new modal/window, select the target Deck and press Move Cards
The shortcut CTRL+D replaces steps 2-4 and eliminates the difference between Notes and Cards view context menus. There is also the Cards menu in the menu bar at the top that can be used instead of the right click context menu.
Note: Notes and Cards are connected in a way that makes moving cards to another deck move the related Note to that deck as well. Notes can “exist” in multiple decks at the same time.
Screenshots:
Meta
The info in the old thread on this is wrong Move cards from one deck to another yet it’s the top Google for that question with both ‘notes’ and ‘cards’, putting a tiny dent in the experience of finding up to date instant solutions for using awesome Anki.
If you want to help this tiny situation, you can
- Instead of moving this into the old thread it’d be better to put [OUTDATED] at the beginning of the old thread title, to help users and search engine indexes find the up to date info quickly and to help AI tell the difference so they are less likely to tell their users the outdated solution.
- Or join the thread but make visitors reach the correct solution quicker by deleting the wrong one or deleting the attention drawing screenshot from it and/or marking this as the solution (not sure mods can do that).
I’m not actively looking for old threads to update by the way, I actually had this problem and was mislead by the old info into getting stuck for minutes what could be seconds instead.
That other thread isn’t outdated. It’s as correct today as it was 5 years ago.
As is the manual – Browsing - Anki Manual .
However your post isn’t correct. Notes and cards aren’t 2 names for the same thing, and only cards can exist within a deck. That’s why the Change Deck action is only included in the Cards menu.
So, no – I’m not going to move this information into that thread, or mark that thread as outdated. There aren’t very many things we can do to stop LLMs from giving incorrect information to users – but keeping incorrect information from being posted widely is probably a good first step.
OP, I believe the source of the confusion is that you have the browser in “Notes” view.
If you look just to the left of the search field, you should see a toggle that you can change back and forth between “Notes” and “Cards”.
When it is set to “Cards” (they way most people have it set most of the time), the items that it displays are cards, and moving cards to another deck works the way described in the older post you linked to.
When it is set to “Notes” (the way you must have it for your screenshot to be possible), the items that it displays are notes, and when you right-click the note you have to go to the “Cards” sub-menu before you can move its associated card(s) to another deck.
As for the difference between cards and notes - it’s a pretty important distinction. A note is one chunk of data - multiple fields of information that belong together. A card is something that’s generated by combining the fields of a note combined in a particular way. A note can have more than one card.
For example, you may have one card type with an English word on the front and a foreign word on the back, and another card type with the foreign word on the front and the English word on the back. Both cards are generated from the same note, and they can be in two different decks if you want them to be.
Usually if you want to move things between decks, it’s easiest to have the browser in cards view.
That said, it was nice of you to try to post something to help other people. And if you accidentally left the browser in Notes view and got confused by that, chances are there are other people out there experiencing the same confusion. Hopefully their searches will lead them here and they will learn the difference between notes and cards too!
You were right on point. If I ever was aware of the switch and what it does, I completely forgot about it. Thank you for your considerate reply. I updated the title and original post to hopefully now be correct.
Good updates, and I like that you included screenshots of the slider/toggle to help people find it!
In general when doing things involving decks, it’s best to think in terms of cards. Cards are the entities that exist in decks, and there is a clear relationship with cards only existing in one deck at a time.
The relationship between notes and decks is more complicated, I’m not sure if it’s correct to say a note is “in” a deck at all or if the note is just associated with a deck because it has cards there. (Which may be why there is no option to move the note, only to move its cards.) Someone more familiar with Anki’s internal data representations may be able to clarify that.
That distinction mostly matters when a note has multiple cards. If you’re in the browser in Notes view, and you use the right-click menu for “Cards → Change Deck”, it will move all of the cards for the note, which is often not the desired result for people who are using multiple card types. But if you only ever have one card per note, then it’s probably fine to move things around while in Notes view.
It’s still wrong in a lot of ways. It’s fine if this helps you understand it for yourself, but it’s not fair of you to instruct other users with incorrect information.
No – you can’t move notes between decks, because notes can’t be in a deck. They don’t “exist” in one deck or multiple decks, because there’s no relationship between notes and decks.
Anki makes cards from your notes, those cards are in decks. When you select a note in “Notes” mode, and you perform a Cards menu action on it, you’re doing that to all of the cards made from that note. But it’s still the cards that you’re actually moving between the decks.
The shortcut doesn’t eliminate any differences between those menus. It’s the shortcut for a specific action in a specific menu – Cards > Change Deck.
