Make existing custom Anki cards reversible

Question

I have had a long discussion with the Anki support asking how I can make some of my existing cards reversible but I have still not been able to do exactly what I want.

I have an existing deck where I want to make some cards reversible. I followed the instructions in this clip on YouTube (they are a little outdated, the +-button is replaced with a menu option Add card type) but the result is that Anki wants to create a new card for every card in the deck, rather than what I want which is to create a reversed item for just the current card.

I would like to go through my deck and pick the cards I want to reverse (or something like that).

The notes I want to make reversible are heavily customized.

How do I make some of the cards in an existing deck reversible?

I'd be grateful for a step-by-step explanation together with some information about why I should perform each action. I want to understand the underlying mechanism.

Answer 1

This is what I did to solve this issue. I started from the basic reversible template and recreated my customized note type. I then selected all cards I wanted to make reversible in the browser, right clicked, selected Change Note Type and then matched all field (Which happened automatically since the note types are identical and fields come in the same order. Very simple.).

(Since I had hundreds of cards and needed to think a bit about which cards that I wanted to be reversible I sorted them in alphabetic order and looked through 50 cards a time or so and applied a flag to the cards that should be converted. Finally I converted all flagged cards and removed the flag.)

The whole process was very simple and understandable when I figured it out. I don't understand the complicated suggestions I have received here and in the support forum that suggest that I should create an extra field with some conditional syntax. In a basic Anki installation, there already are the Basic, Basic (reversible) and Basic (optional reversible) notetypes so they even follow my model there (with two/three identical note types where the only difference is if they are reversible or not).

However, I am still curios what it is that makes a notetype reversible. When comparing the three basic note types I couldn't see any difference in their "source" that explained this property. Would very much appreciate an explanation here.

Answer 2

You have to create an additional field in your note template. Call it something like “Reverse?”. That field is there just to contain a yes/no flag to create the reverse card: empty field means no reverse, non-empty means create the reverse card. Then create a new card template to ask the reverse question. In the front of the card, start with {{#Reverse?}} and end with {{/Reverse?}}. Write the question between these 2 marks, and nothing outside of the 2 marks. Like this:

{{#Reverse?}} write here the question For instance {{BackOfNote}} {{/Reverse?}}

You’re done. Now you just have to write something (anything) in the Reverse? field of a note, and anki will create the reverse card for that note.