iPad: The Missing Manual (2014)

Part 1. The iPad Basics

Chapter 2. Typing, Editing & Searching

As a tablet computer, the iPad faces a fundamental limitation: It has no real keyboard or mouse. Which might be considered a drawback on a gadget that’s capable of running hundreds of thousands of programs.

Fortunately, where there’s a problem, there’s software that can fix it. The modern iPad’s virtual keyboard is smart in all kinds of ways—automatically predicting words and correcting typos, for example. And, hey, this is iOS 8; if you don’t like the iPad’s onscreen keyboard, you can just choose one designed by a different company.

This chapter covers every aspect of working with text on the iPad: entering it, fixing it, dictating it, and searching for it.

The Keyboard

The iPad has no physical keys. A virtual keyboard, therefore, is the only possible built-in system for typing text. Like it or not, you’ll be doing a lot of typing on glass.

The keyboard appears automatically whenever you tap in a place where typing is possible: in an outgoing email, in the Notes app, in the address bar of the Web browser, and so on.

Just tap the key you want. It doesn’t darken or light up to confirm that you’ve typed something, but you may hear a little key-tap sound, and, of course, whatever character you typed appears on the screen.

In darker gray, surrounding the letters, you’ll find these special keys:

§ Shift (). When you tap this key, it turns dark to indicate that it’s in effect. The next letter you type appears as a capital. Then the key returns to normal, meaning that the next letter will be lowercase.

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The iPad has a Caps Lock “key,” too, but it’s hidden. To engage it, double-tap the key; it changes to . You’re now in Caps Lock mode, and you’ll now type in ALL CAPITALS until you tap the key again. (If you can’t seem to make Caps Lock work, try double-tapping the key fast. Or see if maybe Caps Lock got turned off in Settings→General→Keyboard.)

§ Backspace (). This key actually has three speeds.

Tap it once to delete the letter just before the blinking insertion point.

Hold it down to “walk” backward, deleting as you go.

If you hold the key down long enough, it starts deleting words rather than letters, one whole chunk at a time.

§ .?123. Tap this button when you want to type numbers or punctuation. The keyboard changes to offer a palette of numbers and symbols. Tap the same key—which now says ABC—to return to the letters keyboard.

Once you’re on the numbers/symbols pad, a new dark-gray button appears, labeled #+=. Tapping it summons a third keyboard layout, containing the less frequently used symbols, like brackets, the # and % symbols, bullets, and math symbols.

NOTE

Because the period is such a frequently used symbol, there’s an awesome shortcut that doesn’t require switching to the punctuation keyboard: At the end of a sentence, tap the space bar twice. You get a period, a space, and a capitalized letter at the beginning of the next word. (This, too, can be turned off—in Settings→General→Keyboard—although it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to.)

§ return. Tapping this key moves to the next line, just as on a real keyboard. (There’s no Tab key or Enter key in iPad Land.)

Making the Keyboard Work

Some people have no problem tapping those virtual keys; others struggle for days. Either way, here are some tips:

§ Don’t be dismayed by the smaller-than-standard keys.

As you type, use the whole pad of your finger or thumb. Don’t try to tap with only a skinny part of your finger to match the smallish keys. You’ll be surprised at how fast and accurate this method is. (Tap, don’t press.)

§ This may sound like New Age hooey, but trust the keyboard. Don’t pause to check the result after each letter. Just plow on.

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Although you don’t see it, the sizes of the keys on the iPad keyboard are changing all the time. That is, the software enlarges the “landing area” of certain keys, based on probability.

For example, suppose you type tim. The iPad knows that no word in the language begins with timw or timr—and so, invisibly, it enlarges the “landing area” of the E key, which greatly diminishes your chances of making a typo on that last letter.

§ Without cursor keys, how are you supposed to correct an error you made a few sentences ago? Easy—use the loupe.

Hold your fingertip down anywhere in the text until the magnified circle appears. Without lifting your finger, drag anywhere in the text; the insertion point moves along with it. Release when the blue line is where you want to delete or add text, just as though you’d clicked there with a mouse.

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In the Safari address bar, you can skip the part about waiting for the loupe to appear. Once you click into the address, start dragging to make it appear at once.

§ Don’t bother using the Shift key to capitalize a new sentence. The iPad does that capitalizing automatically. (To turn this feature on or off, open Settings→General→Keyboard. Turn off Auto-Capitalization.)

§ You can save time by leaving out the apostrophe in contractions. Type im, dont, or cant. The iPad proposes I’m, don’t, or can’t, so you can just tap the space bar to fix the word and continue.

§ In time, you can learn to type two-handed, as on a laptop. Since you can’t feel the keys (and they’re smaller than a laptop’s) it’s not as fast. But it beats hunting and pecking with one finger as on a phone.

§ If you’re a two-thumbs typist, you’ll like this tip.

Unless you’re a concert pianist, your thumbs probably aren’t long enough to reach all of the keys. But try this: Put your thumbs on the keyboard and pull them apart. The keyboard splits in half and shrinks. The result: a split keyboard whose keys are all thumb-reachable on both sides.

To restore the original keyboard, just push inward on both halves simultaneously.

QuickType

The typing experience in iOS 8 is drastically different, thanks to what Apple calls its QuickType keyboard. It saves you a lot of time, tapping, and errors.

The idea is simple: As you type a sentence, the software predicts which word you might type next—which are the three most likely, actually—and displays them as three buttons above the keyboard.

If you begin the sentence by typing, “I really,” then the three suggestions might be want, don’t, and like.

But what if you intended to say, “I really hope…”? In that case, type the first letter of “hope.” Instantly, the three suggestions change to “h,” hope, and hate. (The first button always shows, in quotes, whatever non-word you’ve typed so far, just in case that’s what you really intend. To place it into your text, you can tap that button or tap the space bar or some punctuation.)

In other words, QuickType is autocomplete on steroids. Frankly, it’s a rush when QuickType correctly proposes finishing a long word for you.

With QuickType, you can produce a sentence like “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” with 26 taps on the screen. If you had to type out the whole thing, you’d have tapped 50 keys. QuickType also adds spaces for you.

A set of three buttons guessing what you might want to type next isn’t a new idea; Android and BlackBerry phones have had it for years. But QuickType is smarter in several ways:

§ QuickType’s suggestions are different in Messages (where language tends to be casual) than in Mail (where people write more formally).

§ Similarly, QuickType modifies its suggestions based on whom you’re writing to. It learns.

§ You can hide the QuickType bar if it’s getting on your nerves. Just swipe down on it with your finger; you’ll see it collapse into a horizontal white line. (To bring it back, swipe up on the white line.)

§ Sometimes, QuickType offers you several words on a single button, to save you even more time (for example, up to or in the).

§ QuickType automatically adds a space after each word you select, so you don’t have to mess with the space bar.

§ When someone texts you a question that ends with a choice (“Coffee, tea, or me?”), the QuickType buttons cleverly offer those choices on the buttons. Before you’ve even typed a single letter, the choices say coffee, tea, and you.

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If you forget to capitalize a word, double-tap to select it. Now tap Shift once (To Initial Cap The Word) or twice (FOR ALL CAPS). Lo and behold, the QuickType suggestions are now capitalized renditions of the word, ready to replace it!

QuickType does mean that you have to split your focus. You have to pay attention to both the keys you’re tapping and the ever-changing word choices above the keyboard. With practice, though, you’ll find that QuickType offers impressive speed and accuracy. You won’t miss the little autocorrect bubbles of old.

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But if you do, you can turn QuickType off. Open Settings→General→Keyboard, and turn off Predictive.

The Spelling Checker

Here’s the world’s friendliest typo-fixer. Apple calls it a spelling checker, but maybe that’s stretching it.

The idea is that anytime the iPad doesn’t recognize something you’ve typed, it draws a dotted red underline beneath it. Tap the word to see a pop-up balloon with one, two, or three alternate spellings. Often, one of them is what you wanted, and you can tap it to fix the mistake. (Equally often, none of them is, and it’s time to break out the loupe and the keyboard.)

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You can also invoke the spelling checker’s suggestions even if you haven’t made a typo. Double-tap the word; on the editing bar that appears, tap Replace.

The Spelling Dictionary

If you start typing a word the iPad doesn’t recognize, the first of the three suggestion buttons displays your word in quotation marks.

If you really do intend to type that nonstandard word, tap its button. You’ve just allowed the “mistake” to stand—and you’ve added it to the iPad’s custom, dynamic dictionary. The tablet assumes that you’ve just typed some name, bit of slang, or terminology that wasn’t in its dictionary originally.

From now on, it will accept that bizarre new word as a legitimate word—and, in fact, will even suggest it the next time you start typing it.

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If you feel you’ve really made a mess of your custom dictionary, and the iPad keeps suggesting ridiculous alternate words, you can always start fresh. From the Home screen, tap Settings→General→Reset, and then tap Reset Keyboard Dictionary. Now the iPad’s dictionary is the way it was when it came from the factory, without any of the words it learned from you.

The Widescreen Keyboard

In most apps, you can turn the tablet 90 degrees to type. When the keyboard stretches out the long way, the keys get a lot bigger. You may find it easier to type.

This feature doesn’t work in every app, but it does work in the apps where you do the most typing: Mail, Messages, the Safari browser, Contacts, Notes, and so on. (The screen also rotates in Camera, Music, Calculator, Calendar, and Stocks, though not for typing purposes.)

Punctuation and Numbers with One Touch

On the iPad, the alphabet keys and most punctuation keys appear on two different keyboard layouts. That’s a hassle, because each time you want, say, an @ sign, it’s an awkward, three-step dance: (1) Tap the 123 key to get the punctuation layout. (2) Tap the @. (3) Tap the ABC key or the space bar to return to the alphabet layout.

Fortunately, there’s a secret way to get a symbol (numbers, slash, hyphen, semicolon, dollar sign, etc.) with only a single finger gesture. The iPad doesn’t register most key presses until you lift your finger. But the Shift and Punctuation keys register their taps on the press down instead.

So here’s what you can do, all in one motion:

1. Touch the .?123 key, but don’t lift your finger. The punctuation layout appears.

2. Slide your finger onto the number or symbol key you want and release. The ABC layout returns automatically. You’ve typed a symbol or number with one finger touch instead of three.

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If you’re a two-thumbed typist, you can also hit the 123 key with your left thumb and then tap the punctuation key with your right. It even works on the #+= sub-punctuation layout, although you’ll probably visit that screen less often.

In fact, you can type any of the punctuation symbols the same way. This technique makes a huge difference in the usability of the keyboard.

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This same trick saves you a finger-press when capitalizing words, too. You can put your finger down on the key and slide directly onto the letter you want to type in its uppercase version. Or, if you’re a two-handed iPad typist, you can work the Shift key like the one on your computer: Hold it down with your left thumb, type a letter with your right, and then release both.

Accented Characters

To produce an accented character (like é, ë, è, ê, and so on), keep your finger pressed on that key for 1 second. A palette of diacritical marks appears; slide onto the one you want.

Not all keys sprout this pop-up palette. Here’s a list of the keys that do:

Typing Shortcuts (Abbreviation Expanders)

Here’s a feature that nobody ever talks about—probably because nobody even knows it exists. But it’s a huge time- and sanity-saver; for a gadget with no physical keys, anything that can do your typing for you is very welcome indeed.

You can program your tablet to expand abbreviations that you type. Set up addr to type your entire mailing address, or eml to type out your email address. Create two-letter abbreviations for big legal or technical words you have to type a lot. Set up goaway to type out a polite rejection paragraph for use in email. And so on.

This feature has been in Microsoft Office forever (called AutoCorrect). And it’s always been available as a separate app (TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, for example—but because they were separate, you had to copy your expanded text, switch to the target program, and then paste). But since it’s now built right into the operating system, it works anywhere you can type.

You build your list of abbreviations in Settings→General→Keyboard→Shortcuts. Tap the button. On the resulting screen, type the expanded text into the Phrase box. (It can be very long, but it all has to be one continuous blob of text; it can’t contain Returns.) In the Shortcut box, type the abbreviation you want to trigger the phrase.

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The Shortcut box says “Optional.” You might wonder: Why would you leave the shortcut blank? Then your new shortcut will be un-triggerable and pointless.

Not quite. It’s optional to enable a sneaky trick: to make the tablet stop mis-replacing some word (for example, insisting that you mean PTA when you type pta, a new chemical you’ve designed).

In that case, type your phrase into the Phrase box, but leave Shortcut blank.

That’s it! Now, whenever you type one of the abbreviations you’ve set up, the iPad proposes replacing it with your substituted text.

Swype, SwiftKey, and Other Keyboards

This new iOS 8 feature is a really big deal: You’re no longer stuck with Apple’s onscreen keyboard. You can, for the first time, install virtual keyboards from other companies. (Hey—just like on Android devices!)

Many people swear that these rival keyboard systems are superior to the standard iOS 8 keyboard in speed and accuracy. In particular, people like keyboards like Swype; in these systems, you don’t have to tap each key to spell out a word. Instead, you rapidly and sloppily drag your fingeracross the glass, hitting the letters you want and lifting your finger at the end of a word. The software figures out which word you were going for.

Sounds bizarre, but it’s fast and very satisfying. And pretty; your finger leaves a sort of fire trail as it slides across the glass.

These keyboards generally incorporate their own versions of QuickType—that is, they offer three predictions about the word you’re going to type next.

Most don’t vary their predictions depending on the person you’re writing to or which app you’re using, as iOS 8’s predictions do. But they do offer other impressive features; for example, SwiftKey can sync what it’s learned to your other gadgets (iOS 8 doesn’t do that; it learns, but its education is locked on your iPad).

Then there are Fleksy, TouchPal, KuaiBoard, and a raft of others.

Note, however, that none of them offer a button. Apple doesn’t allow them access to Siri, so you can’t use voice dictation when one of these keyboards is on the screen. And, sometimes, you can’t use these alternate keyboards for typing into Password boxes.

Otherwise, these alternate keyboard systems are fascinating and, often, better and faster than Apple’s. Many are free, so they’re well worth exploring.

To install an alternate keyboard, download it from the App Store (Swype, SwiftKey, and Other Keyboards).

Then go to Settings→General→Keyboard→Keyboards. When you tap Add New Keyboard, you’ll see your newly downloaded keyboard’s name. Turn it on by tapping it.

Now, when you arrive at any writing area in any app, you’ll discover that a new icon has appeared on the keyboard: a tiny globe () next to the space bar. Tap it. The keyboard changes to the new one you installed. (Each tap on the button summons the next keyboard you’ve installed—or you can hold your finger down on it for a pop-up list.)

International Typing

Because the iPad is sold around the world, it has to be equipped for nonEnglish languages—and even non-Roman alphabets. Fortunately, it’s ready.

To prepare the iPad for language switching, go to Settings→General→Language & Region. Tap iPad Language to set the iPad’s primary language (for menus, button labels, and so on).

To make other keyboards available, go to Settings→General→Keyboard→Keyboards, tap Add New Keyboard, and then turn on the keyboard layouts you’ll want available: Russian, Italian, whatever.

If you choose Japanese or Chinese, you’re offered the chance to specify which kind of character input you want. For Japanese, you can choose a QWERTY layout (Romaji) or a Kana keypad. For Simplified or Traditional Chinese, your choices include the Pinyin input method (which uses a QWERTY layout) or handwriting recognition, where you draw your symbols onto the screen with your fingertip; a palette of potential interpretations appears to the right. (That’s handy, since there are thousands of characters in Chinese, and you’d need a 65-inch iPad to fit the keyboard.) Or hey—it’s a free tic-tac-toe game!

As described in the previous section, a new key has now appeared on the keyboard: next to the space bar. Each time you tap it, you rotate to the next keyboard you requested earlier. The new language’s name appears briefly on the space bar to identify it.

Thanks to that button, you can freely mix languages and alphabets within the same document without having to duck back to some control panel to make the change. And thanks to the iPad’s virtual keyboard, the actual letters on the “keys” change in real time. (As an Apple PR rep puts it, “That’s really hard to do on a BlackBerry.”)

The button works in three ways:

§ Tap it once to restore the most recent keyboard. Great if you’re frequently flipping back and forth between two languages.

§ Tap it rapidly to cycle among all the keyboards you’ve selected. (The name of the language appears briefly on the space bar to help you out.)

§ If you, some United Nations translator, like to write in a lot of different languages, you don’t have to tap that key over and over again to cycle through the keyboard layouts. Instead, hold your finger down on the key. You get a convenient pop-up menu of the languages you’ve turned on, so you can jump directly to the one you want.

The Emoji Keyboard

Even if you speak only one language, don’t miss the emoji keyboard. It gives you a palette of smileys and fun symbols, also known as emoticons, to use in your correspondence.

Install it just as you would any other keyboard, as described above. Now, though, when you choose its name from the onscreen keyboard, you get hundreds upon hundreds of little graphic symbols, spread across five categories (plus a Recently Used category). Each category offers several pages full of symbols, represented by tiny dots above the keyboard.

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To return to a category’s first page, you don’t have to swipe; just tap the category’s icon.

The bottom line is clear: Smileys are only the beginning.

NOTE

These symbols show up fine on Apple machinery (phones, tablets, Macs) but generally don’t appear on other kinds of phones.

Connecting a Real Keyboard

This iPad feature barely merits an asterisk in Apple’s marketing materials. But if you’re any kind of wandering journalist, blogger, or writer, you might flip your lid over this: You can type on a real, full-sized, physical keyboard, and watch the text magically appear on your iPad’s screen—wirelessly.

That’s because you can use a Bluetooth keyboard (the Apple Wireless Keyboard, for example) to type into your iPad. Dozens of iPad cases with built-in keyboards are also available; most also connect with Bluetooth.

To set this up, from the Home screen, tap Settings→Bluetooth. Turn Bluetooth on, if it’s not already.

Now turn on the wireless keyboard. After a moment, its name shows up on the iPad screen in the Devices list; tap it. You’ll know the pairing was successful, because when you tap in a spot where the onscreen keyboard would usually appear, well, it doesn’t.

Typing is a lot easier and faster with a real keyboard. As a bonus, the Apple keyboard’s brightness, volume, and playback controls actually work to control the iPad’s brightness, volume, and playback.

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The Apple keyboard’s key even works: It makes the iPad’s onscreen keyboard appear or disappear. Oh, and to switch languages, press ⌘-space bar on the wireless keyboard. You’ll see the list of languages. Tap the space bar again to choose a different language.

When you’re finished using the keyboard, turn it off. The iPad goes back to normal.

Dictation

The iPad’s speech-recognition feature, sometimes called Siri (even though Siri is also the voice command feature), lets you enter text anywhere, into any program, just by speaking. Behind the scenes, it’s using the same Nuance recognition technology that powers the Dragon line of dictation programs.

It’s extremely fast and, in iOS 8, much more accurate (especially if you have an accent). Suddenly you don’t have to fuss with the tiny keyboard. The experience of “typing” is no longer claustrophobic. You can blather away into an email or draft a memo without ever looking at the screen.

Now, before you get all excited, here are the necessary footnotes:

§ Voice typing works only when you have an Internet connection. If you don’t, the little button on the keyboard appears dimmed.

§ Voice typing works best if there’s not a lot of background noise.

§ Voice typing isn’t always practical, since everybody around you can hear what you’re saying.

§ Voice typing isn’t always accurate. Often, you’ll have to correct an error or two.

All right—expectations set? Then here’s how to type by speaking.

First, open up someplace where you can call up the keyboard: Messages, Notes, Mail, Safari, whatever. Tap, if necessary, so that the onscreen keyboard appears.

Tap the next to the space bar. When you hear the xylophone note, say what you have to say (below, top).

If there’s background noise, hold the tablet up to your head; if it’s relatively quiet, a couple of feet away is fine. You don’t have to speak slowly, loudly, or weirdly; speak normally.

As you speak, the words fly onto the screen; that’s new in iOS 8. (In previous iOS versions, you’d have to wait until you stopped speaking to see any text appear. Sometimes, no text appeared at all, and you gnashed your teeth at all the time you’d just wasted.)

You have to speak your own punctuation, like this: “Dear Dad (colon): Please send money (dash)—as much as you can (comma), please (period).” The table at the end of this section describes all the different punctuation symbols you can dictate.

After you finish speaking, tap Done. Another xylophone note plays—higher, this time—and you may see some of the words change right before your eyes, as though Siri is changing her mind. In fact, she is; she’s using the context of all the words you said to revise what she originallythought you said, as you said it. See?

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If no text appears at all, your Internet connection probably isn’t good enough. You can try again, or you can just sigh and resort to typing with your finger.

If the transcription contains errors, you can tap with your finger to edit them, exactly as you would fix an error in something you typed (previous page, bottom). (Make the effort; you’re simultaneously teaching your iPad to do better the next time.) Or, if the whole thing is a mess, you canshake your iPad, the universal gesture for Undo.

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Often, the iPad knows perfectly well when it might have gotten a word wrong—it draws a dashed underline beneath words or phrases it’s insecure about. You can tap one of those words or phrases to see the iPad’s alternative interpretation, which is often correct.

Usually, you’ll find the accuracy pretty darned good, considering you didn’t have to train the software to recognize your voice. You’ll also find that the accuracy is better when you dictate complete sentences, and that long words fare better than short ones.

Punctuation

Here’s a handy table that shows you what punctuation you can say and how to say it.

NOTE

If you’ve ever used Dragon NaturallySpeaking (for Windows) or Dragon Dictation (for the Mac), then you already know these commands; they’re the standard Nuance dictation-software shortcuts, because that’s what the iPad uses behind the scenes.

You can also say “percent sign” (%), “at sign” (@), “dollar sign” ($), “cent sign” (¢), “euro sign” (€), “yen sign” (¥), “pounds sterling sign” (£), “section sign” (§), “copyright sign” (©), “registered sign” (®), “trademark sign” (™), “greater-than sign” or “less-than sign” (> or <), “degree sign” (°), “caret” (^), “tilde” (~), “vertical bar” (l), and “pound sign” (#).

The software automatically capitalizes the first new word after a period, question mark, or exclamation point. But you can also force it to capitalize words you’re dictating by saying “cap” right before the word, like this: “Dear (cap) Mom, I’ve run away to join (cap) The (cap) Circus (comma), a nonprofit cooperative for runaway jugglers.”

Here’s another table—this one shows the other commands for capitalization, plus spacing and spelling commands.

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Speak each of the on/off commands as a separate utterance, with a small pause before and after.

You don’t always have to dictate these formatting commands, by the way. The iPad automatically inserts hyphens into phone numbers (you say, “2125561000,” and get “212-556-1000”); formats two-line street addresses without your having to say, “New line” before the city); handles prices automatically (“six dollars and thirty-two cents” becomes “$6.32”).

It formats dates and Web addresses well, too; you can even use the nerdy shortcut “dub-dub-dub” when you want the “www” part of a Web address.

The iPad recognizes email addresses, too, as long as you remember to say “at sign” at the right spot. You’d say, “harold (underscore) beanfield (at sign) gmail (dot) com” to get harold_beanfield@gmail.com.

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You can combine these formatting commands. Many iPad owners have wondered: “How do I voice-type the word “comma,” since saying, “comma” types out only the symbol?”

The solution: Say, “No space on, no caps on, C, O, M, M, A, no space off, no caps off.” That gives you the word “comma.”

Then again, it might just be easier to type that one out with your finger.

Cut, Copy, Paste

Copy and Paste do just what you’d expect. They let you grab some text off a Web page and paste it into an email message, copy directions from email into Notes, paste a phone number from your address book into a text message, and so on.

So how do you select text and trigger Cut, Copy, and Paste functions on a machine with no mouse and no menus? As on the Mac or PC, it takes three steps.

Step 1: Select the Text

Start by highlighting the text you want to cut or copy.

§ To select all. Suppose you intend to cut or copy everything in the text box or message. In that case, tap anywhere in the text to place the blinking insertion point. Then tap the insertion point itself to summon the selection buttons—one of which is Select All.

§ To select some. Double-tap the first word (or last word) that you want in the copied selection. That word is now highlighted, with blue dots at diagonal corners. Drag these handles to expand the selection to include all the text you want. The little magnifying loupe helps you release the dot at just the right spot.

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On a Web page, you can’t very well double-tap to select a word, because double-tapping means “zoom in.” Instead, hold your finger down on a word to produce the blue handles; the loupe magnifies the proceedings to help you. (If you highlight the wrong word, keep your finger down and slide to the correct one; the highlighting goes with you.)

However, if you’re zoomed out to see the whole page, holding down your finger highlights the entire block of text (a paragraph or even a whole article) instead of one word. Now you can expand the selection to include a photo, if you like; that way, you can copy and paste the whole enchilada into an outgoing email message.

Step 2: Cut or Copy

At this point, you’ve highlighted the material you want, and the Cut and Copy buttons are staring you in the face. Tap Cut (to remove the selected text) or Copy (to leave it but place a duplicate on your invisible Clipboard).

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And what if you want to get rid of the text without copying it to the Clipboard (because you want to preserve something you copied earlier, for example)? Easy: Just tap the key!

Step 3: Paste

Finally, switch to a different spot in the text, even if it’s in a different window (for example, a new email message) or a different app (for example, Calendar or Notes). Tap in any spot where you’re allowed to type. Tap the Paste button to paste what you cut or copied. Ta-da!

(Possible Step 4: Undo)

Everyone makes mistakes, right? Fortunately, there’s a secret Undo command, which can come in handy when you cut, copy, or paste something by mistake.

The trick is to shake the iPad. The iPad then offers you an Undo button, which you can tap to confirm the backtracking. One finger touch instead of three.

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The shake-to-undo feature also works to undo dictating or typing—not just cutting or pasting.

In fact, you can even undo the Undo. Just shake the tablet again; now the screen offers you a Redo button. Fun! (Except when you shake the tablet by accident and you get the Nothing to Undo message. But still.)

The Definitions Dictionary

On The Spelling Checker, you can read about the spelling dictionary that’s built into the iOS—but that’s just a list of words. Your iPad also has a real dictionary, one that shows you definitions.

You can look up any word that appears on the screen. Double-tap it to get the editing bar shown here at top; then tap Define.

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You can also double-tap the blinking insertion point that’s just before a word. On the editing bar, tap to see the Define button.

(If you discover that there are “No definitions found,” tap Manage at the bottom of this screen for a list of dictionaries that you can download: English, French, Simplified Chinese, and so on. Tap to download the ones you think you’ll use.)

Speak!

The iPad can read to you, too. Visit Settings→General→Accessibility→Speech and turn on Speak Selection. Choose a language (or accent), a voice, and a speaking rate. (The more realistic-sounding voices, like Alex and his brother Enhanced Quality, require you to download some audio files from Apple. Just tap the name to begin the download.)

From now on, among the other buttons that pop up whenever you select text, a handy Speak button appears. (You can see it in the illustration above.)

You can use the Speak button whenever you want to double-check the pronunciation of a word, whenever you want to have a Web article or email read to you aloud while you’re getting dressed for the day, or whenever you lose your voice and just want to communicate with the rest of the world.

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Once you tap Speak, the button changes to say Pause. You’re in charge.

Spotlight: Global Search

The iPad’s global search feature is called Spotlight—and in iOS 8, it’s really global. Spotlight is no longer primarily for searching your tablet; it’s more like a typed version of Siri, in that it can call up information about movies, restaurants, news, and so on (details below).

How to Use Spotlight

The Spotlight screen is built into your Home screens. To see it, drag downward within the screen. (If you drag down from the top by accident, you’ll open the Notification Center, which is a different story.)

In any case, the keyboard opens automatically (next page). Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you were trying to find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice. (Spotlight doesn’t find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the beginnings of words.)

As you type, a results list appears below the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find containing what you’ve typed so far.

They’re neatly grouped by category; the beginning of each category is marked with a heading like CONTACTS or MUSIC.

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If you drag your finger to scroll the list, the keyboard helpfully vanishes so you can see more results.

Here’s what you might find in Spotlight’s list of results:

§ Applications. For frequent downloaders, this may be the juiciest function: Spotlight searches the names of every app on your iPad. If you have dozens installed, this is a much more efficient way to find one than trying to page through all the Home screens, eyeballing the icons as you go. (The search results even identify which folder an app is in.)

§ Spotlight Suggestions. This is the big new feature in iOS 8—the business about finding movies, music, apps, and other stuff from the Web.

The feature itself works beautifully. The hard part is teaching yourself to use it—just remembering that it’s available.

Spotlight now lists results from Wikipedia (when you search for, say, “rhubarb” or “Thomas Edison”); news (search for “SF Giants” or “Middle East negotiations”); restaurants, shops, and businesses (“Olive Garden” or “Apple Store”); the App Store (“Instagram” or “Angry Birds”); the iTunes Store (“Gravity” or “Beatles”); and the iBooks store (“Grisham” or “Little Women”).

The results list identifies which category each hit comes from. Tapping a result does what you’d expect: for a Web article, opens the article; for a business, opens its Maps page so you can call it or get instant directions; for something from an Apple Store, opens the appropriate store.

§ Contacts. First names, last names, and company names.

§ Music, Podcasts, Videos, Audiobooks. Song, performer, and album names, plus the names of podcasts, videos, and audiobooks.

§ Notes, Reminders, Voice Memos. The actual text of your notes and to-do items, and the names and descriptions of voice memos.

§ Events. Calendar stuff: appointment names, meeting invitees, and locations (but not any notes attached to your appointments).

§ Mail. The To, From, and Subject fields of all accounts. For certain accounts, you can even search inside the messages.

§ Messages. Yep, you can search your text messages, too.

§ Bing Web Results. You can tap Search Web at the bottom of the results list to hand off to Safari for a search. Handy to have it built right into Spotlight, really.

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Many apps, like Contacts, Mail, Calendar, Music, and Notes, have their own search boxes (usually hidden until you scroll to the top of their lists). Those individual search functions are great when you’re already in the program where you want to search. The Spotlight difference is that it searches all these apps at once.

If you see the name and icon of whatever you were hoping to dig up, tap to open it. The corresponding app opens automatically.

How to Tweak Spotlight

You’ve just read about how Spotlight works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor its behavior to fit it to the kinds of things you look up most often. To open Spotlight’s settings, start on the Home screen. Tap Settings→General→Spotlight Search.

You can tweak Spotlight in two ways here:

§ Turn off categories. The checkmarks identify the kinds of things that Spotlight tracks. If you find that Spotlight uses up precious screen space listing categories you don’t use much, then tap to turn off their checkmarks. Now more of Spotlight’s space-constrained screen is allotted to icon types you do care about.

§ Prioritize the categories. This screen also lets you change the order of the category results; using the grip strip at the right side, you can drag an individual list item up or down.

For example, the factory setting is for Contacts to appear first in the menu. But Contacts has its own search box, so it might make more sense to put Events or Applications at the top of the list so that it’s quicker to do a schedule check or to fire up a certain app. You’ll have less scrolling to do once the results menu appears.