Search for anything with the Spotlight tool (I especially like to do this for PDFs and similar docs.) It’s all tied to iCloud, too, so you can access your Desktop and Documents folder from your Mac. Browse lets you see the doc folders for individual apps, and you make made additional folders for further organization. Recent lets you see all the documents you’ve recently used, and you can open them from there. It may not be super pretty, but it’s super useful.Īt the most basic, you’ll use two tabs.
It’s not exactly like sifting through doc folders on a Mac or PC, but it comes reasonably close.
And that’s why we should all praise the arrival of the new Files app. Use the Files app for better organizationīack in the dark ages of, oh, 2017, the only convenient way of finding files you made on your iPad was to open them from the app you made them in. For a more thorough rundown, check out our dedicated how-to. After that, you’ll have a chance to sign the document using the Markup tool (with either your finger or the Apple Pencil), and from there you can save it as a PDF.
Once you’ve got the document you want to scan in front of you, open a new document in the Notes app and press the plus sign at the bottom. After all, Apple lets you scan documents and makes PDFs from those scans straight from the Notes app. I admire third-party scanner apps like Scannerly, but they’re not really necessary. Just tap the display with your Apple Pencil while your iPad’s still locked, and an empty page in Notes will immediately pop up on the screen. It’s super easy to jot down a quick note if you’ve got an Apple Pencil in your hand. Tap the screen with the Apple Pencil to activate the Notes app To return the keyboard to normal, press down on the keyboard icon again and tap Dock and Merge. Not only will this speed up your productivity since you can always see the dock when you swipe up from the bottom of the display, but it’s also essential when you need to access an app through split-screen multitasking. I suggest putting as many commonly used apps on the dock as you can. The iPhone, by contrast, only lets you put four apps or folders down there. The iPad makes it super easy to open commonly used apps by letting you put a ton of them on the dock. It’s great for selecting big blocks of text. The keyboard’s keys will vanish, allowing you to move a cursor around the display as though you were using a MacBook trackpad. Selecting the rest of the text in a paragraph will then be much easier than it would be with your finger. It works best if you select a single word first and then switch on the virtual trackpad. Whenever the digital keyboard is visible, put two fingers on the keyboard at once and move them around.
The iPad currently doesn’t support wired or Bluetooth mice, but to Apple’s credit, it has a cool (if limited) substitute. When you want to get rid of it, swipe the thin white bar at the top of the app to the left or right to make it disappear. Instead, drop it somewhere around the middle. Just follow the steps above, but don’t drag the second app all the way to the edge. If you just want to use the second app for a quick reference, you can make it a thin window that floats “above” the primary app. I sometimes wish Apple could figure out a way to make Split View work on the larger iPhones. (And yep, the app needs to already be in the dock for this to work.) If all goes well, the screen will split into two halves with an adjustable divider down the middle. Whenever you want to see two apps side-by-side-such as a Safari webpage alongside a Pages doc-open one app the normal way, and then drag up the second app’s icon from the dock all the way to the left or right edge of the display. Split View multitasking is one of the iPad’s biggest advantages over the iPhone.