iPad Tips and Tricks to Help You Work More Efficiently

Last updated on: September 14, 2014

The beauty of an Apple product is in the simplicity. It’s often quite easy to feel comfortable with a new product straight out of the box. That being said, Apple incorporates an incredible amount of detail into their machines to increase efficiency and help you work smarter rather than harder. In this post, I outline a few iPad tips and tricks that may help you reduce the time you spend tapping away. First I’ll cover a number of keyboard shortcuts to save you time typing, emailing, etc., and then dive into some fun features that you may not realize are possible. ‍

Keyboard Shortcuts

Learning to quickly navigate your iPad can save you a lot of time in the long run.

Quickly add a period at the end of a sentence: When you’re typing on the keyboard, double-tap the space bar at the end of a sentence to insert a period rather than pressing the period button.
Turn on Caps Lock: Double-tap the Shift key while in the keyboard view and start typing. You’ll see a line appear under the up arrow on the Shift key to indicate that Caps Lock is turned on. To turn it off just tap once on the same key again.
Adding Numbers: Rather than switching to the number keyboard and then switching back to the letter keyboard, press and hold the "123" key, then drag your finger to a number to select it. When you lift your finger from the number, the letter keyboard will appear again.
Writing Email Address: When entering an email address, hold down the period key to see a list of address endings (.us, .org, .edu, .net, .com).
Typing Web URLs: Same as above, when typing a URL into the address bar, hold down the period key to see a list of alternative URL endings (.com, .us, .org, .edu, .net, .de, eu, etc.).

Now some fun iPad tips and tricks to help you with everyday use.

Tips for Everyday Use

Recharge your battery faster by turning on airplane mode: Go to settings and turn on Airplane Mode, which is at the top of the list. Plug in your iPad and it will charge twice as fast!
Search for text on a web page: If you’re looking for a specific keyword in a website, you can actually search for a specific word or phrase in the Safari browser. With the page you want to search open, tap on the address bar at the top and then enter the word or words you want to search for. This will display results from Google search, but if you scroll down the list you will see a heading marked 'On This Page'. Press it and it'll let you cycle through the results from the page you were viewing.
Split the keyboard in half: If you find that you prefer to type with your thumbs, you may prefer to split the keyboard so you can hold the iPad with both hands and still easily type. To try out this layout, first go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard and turn on Split Keyboard. Open the keyboard and press and hold the keyboard button in the bottom right and select the "Split" option from the menu that pops up.

A quicker way of getting to the split keyboard is to simply pull the keyboard apart with your fingers. Put your fingers in the middle of the keyboard and then move them to either side. This will put the iPad into split keyboard mode. When the keyboard is split, you actually have access to invisible keys so you’re not limited to what is on the screen. Check out the image below to see what I mean.

Increase the size of text in certain apps: Having trouble seeing text in your iPad apps? Just go to Settings -> General -> Text Size and then slide the bar to make the text size larger or smaller depending on what you like best. This won’t change the text size in all apps, but will change the text size in all native Apple apps and third-party apps that support Dynamic Type.
Quickly switch between apps: If you’re running multiple apps on your iPad at the same time, you can switch between them without having to navigate to your home screen and reopening them. Double tap the Home button (the single physical button below the screen) and a list of all open apps will pop up. Swipe to the left to scroll through them and tap on the one you want to open.

You can also move between apps quickly by placing four fingers on the screen and swiping all of them up at once. Apple refers to this as a “gesture” and this is enabled by default on the iPad 2 and newer iPads. For the first-generation iPad, you can turn on these gestures by going to Settings -> General -> Multitask Gestures.

Force close an app: Have you ever had an app freeze and weren’t sure what to do? There is an easy way to quickly close a frozen app to start fresh. Similar to the above tip, double tap the Home screen to see the list of open apps. Find the frozen app and swipe up. It will disappear and reset. It is worthwhile to close all your apps periodically to increase the performance of your iPad. Go through the list and swipe up on all the open apps until nothing is left in the list.
Take a screenshot: Have you ever wanted to capture an image from the screen of your iPad? Press the Home button and the Sleep button (top right edge) simultaneously and you will take a screenshot of whatever you see on the device. You'll hear the same sound as when you take a picture with the Camera app and the image will be saved to your Camera Roll, where all your other photos are stored.

Are your Home or Sleep buttons broken? Create virtual buttons to keep your iPad functional: A function called Assistive Touch provides easy access to a virtual version of all the iPad's physical buttons such as Home, screen capture, sleep, volume, or lock screen. To enable Assistive Touch, go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility -> Assistive Touch and turn the feature on. You will see a small white circle appear on your screen. Press the button to open the list of menu items that you can normally only access through your home or sleep buttons.

And the most important, adding emoticons ;): Have you ever sent a sarcastic text message or email just to get a confused or annoyed response? Love them or hate them, emojis can help easily portray emotions in your written text. Add them to your keyboard by choosing: Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard -> Emoji. You will now see the emoji keyboard appear when you tap the circular (globe) image in the bottom left of the keyboard.

Do you have other time-saving tips that you use on your iPad? Let us know what you find most useful!