Paul McFedries - iPad and iPad Pro For Dummies

You can select and copy (or cut) content from one place on the iPad and then paste it elsewhere, just like you can with a Mac or PC. You might copy text or a URL from the web and paste it into an email or a note. Or you might copy a bunch of pictures or video into an email.

Here’s how you to exploit the copy-and-paste feature:

1 Select a word by tapping and holding down on it or double-tapping it.iPadOS selects the word and displays the Edit menu just above the selection. If you don’t see the Edit menu, tap the selection.

2 Drag the grab points (also called grab handles ) to select a larger or smaller block of text.The grab points, which are vertical lines connected to circles, appear to the left and right of the selected text, as shown in Figure 2-3. The tininess of the grab points means that dragging them may take a little practice.

3 Tap Copy.If you were deleting text from a document you created, instead of copying and pasting, you would tap Cut instead.FIGURE 2-3: Drag the grab handles to select text.

4 Open the app into which you want to paste the copied text.

5 Position the cursor where you want to insert the text you just copied, and then tap the cursor.Up pops the Edit menu, a version of which is shown in Figure 2-4. (The commands you see vary by app.)

6 Tap Paste to paste the text into the document.

FIGURE 2-4: Tap Paste and text will appear.

If you make a mistake when you were cutting, pasting, or typing, shake the iPad. Doing so undoes the last edit (provided that you tap the Undo Paste or Undo option when it appears and keep the shake feature enabled in Settings ⇒ Accessibility ⇒ Touch ⇒ Shake to Undo).

You might also see these options:

Auto-Correct: If you happen to select a word with a typo, the iPad might underline that word. If you tap the underlined word, the iPad might show you one or more words it thinks you meant to spell (or you see No Replacements Found). Tap a suggested word to accept it.

Predict: A predictive word feature reveals up to three word or phrase options in buttons just above the keyboard. If one of these words or phrases is what you had in mind, tap the appropriate button.

Replace: The iPad might show you possible replacement words. For example, replacement words for test might be fest, rest , or text. Tap the word to substitute it for the word you originally typed.

Indent Right or Left: Pretty self-explanatory. With this option, you can indent highlighted text to the right or left.

Look Up: Tap your selected word for a definition, courtesy of the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of English, an Apple dictionary, or a foreign language dictionary if you’ve downloaded any dictionaries onto your iPad. Look Up goes well beyond definitions and includes searches that extend to the App Store, Apple Music, Twitter, the web, Wikipedia, and more.

Through multitasking, you can run two or more apps simultaneously and switch from one app to another. The following examples illustrate what multitasking enables you to do on your iPad:

A third-party app, such as Slacker Personal Radio, can continue to play music while you surf the web, peek at pictures, or check email. Without multitasking, Slacker would pause the moment you opened another app.

A navigation app can update your position while you’re listening to, say, Pandora internet radio. From time to time, the navigation app will pipe in with turn-by-turn directions, lowering the volume of the music so you can hear the instructions.

If you’re uploading images to a photo website and the process is taking longer than you want, you can switch to another app, confident that the images will continue to upload behind the scenes.

You can leave voice notes in the Evernote app while checking out a web page.

Double-press the Home button (if your iPad has one) or swipe up from the bottom of your screen to display App Switcher. You see thumbnail versions of your open apps. Scroll to the left to see more apps. Tap the thumbnail for the app you want to switch to; the app remembers where you left off. If you hold the tablet sideways in landscape mode, as shown in Figure 2-5, the previews for your apps appear sideways, too.

To remove an app from App Switcher, drag the app’s thumbnail up and beyond the top of the screen. Poof — it’s gone.

Now let’s look at some other tricks that make multitasking even more powerful.

FIGURE 2-5: App Switcher shows you the apps you’ve recently used or are still running.

You can exploit all that gorgeous screen real estate on your iPad to make multitasking even more productive.

For starters, there’s a feature called split view, which enables you to display two app windows onscreen at the same time, with each app getting half the screen.

Launch the first app you want to use and then tap the app’s multitasking icon: the three dots in the top center of the app window (see Figure 2-6). This displays the multitasking menu, a version of which is pointed out in Figure 2-6. Tap the split view icon, and then tap the icon of other app you want onscreen. Now the second app is running side by side with your first app! Split view mode is shown in Figure 2-6. Drag the gray resizer bar between the two apps to resize them.

The split view feature works with Apple’s own apps and some third-party apps. If you don’t see the multitasking icon, it means the app doesn’t support split view.

FIGURE 2-6: iPadOS split view in action with Safari on the left and Mail on the right.

In Safari, you have two ways to open in split view. The first way is to long-press a link on a web page, which opens several options, including a preview of the link. Tap the Open in Split View command to open the linked page in split view. The second way requires you to have at least two tabs open in the Safari app. You can then drag a tab to the left or right edge of the screen and release, and a new split view is created.

I bet you can think of all sorts of reasons to run two apps at the same time. Maybe you’re composing a message to a friend in the Mail app while scrolling through Safari in the smaller panel to find a place to have lunch. Or perhaps you’re sketching in one app while using a photo in another as a reference point.

When you’re finished with split view, tap the multitasking icon in the app you want to use and then tap the full screen icon.

Another way to get two apps to share the screen at the same time is the slide over feature. Instead of running side by side, as in split view, with slide over one app runs full screen and a second app runs in a window that takes up about a third of the screen width. This second window is in slide over mode, which means it runs on top of the full-screen app and can be dragged to the left or right side of the screen, as needed.