THE “BRAIN” BEHIND THE iPad—its operating system—is smart enough to respond to a series of very different touches. The ones you make depend on what you want to do. Here are the moves:

THE IPAD HAS NO physical keys—unless you buy the optional keyboard (see Add an External Keyboard). A virtual keyboard, therefore, is the traditional way to enter text.

The iPad’s keyboard pops up whenever you tap an area of the screen that accepts input, like the address bar of a browser, the text area of a new email message, or a search box.

To use the keyboard, just tap the key you want. As your finger hits the glass, the light-gray target key flickers to a darker gray.

The keyboard works in portrait (vertical) mode, but it’s roomier in landscape (horizontal) view. You can also split the keyboard in half to thumb-type, as on a smartphone keypad; see Use the Split Keyboard. The button with the icon (circled above) hides the keyboard.

The keyboard has a few other special keys:

When you type letters into a web form (or any place that’s not a web address), the iPad adds a Return key to the keyboard so you can move from one line to the next. This key morphs to say Join when you type in a WiFi password, Go when you enter a URL, and Search when you query the search box.

AS YOU’VE PROBABLY DISCOVERED by now, the iPad keyboard has to get a bit creative to fit all the keys you need on a small patch of glass. But face it, when you’re trying to finish an email message, jumping around between keyboard layers to find an ampersand or apostrophe gets old fast. To help balance economy and efficiency, Apple built in a number of keyboard shortcuts and tricks.

Speaking of the Settings area, the iPad tucks away several helpful shortcuts there, too. Go to Settings→General→Keyboard to see them.

The Keyboard Settings area has other helpful features, like international keyboards (Use an International or Emoji Keyboard) and the split keyboard (Use the Split Keyboard), that make it easier to type while holding the iPad in your hands. But now that you’ve mastered keyboard shortcuts, how about learning some multitasking shortcuts? Just turn the page.

THE IPAD’S HOME BUTTON offers a reliable way to go back to the tablet’s Home screen, switch to a different app, or launch a new one. Yes, that Home button can really get a workout. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a quick on-screen way to change apps without fumbling around for a physical control?

As of iOS 5 and later, there is. The iPad offers multitasking gestures—full-fingered moves on the touchscreen—as an alternative to pushing the Home button for certain tasks. With four or five fingers (depending on what you’re most comfortable with) grazing the glass, you can jump around between apps and always return to the iPad’s Home screen.

Your iPad should be set up to do these fancy finger moves by default. But if you try them out and nothing happens except personal frustration, go to the Home screen and tap Settings→General→Multitasking Gestures→On.

Here’s what you can do and how the multitasking gestures work:

Multitasking gestures may not be for everyone, especially if you put a lot of fingers on-screen anyway and don’t want to accidentally switch between open apps or constantly end up climbing out of the apps drawer. But they save a lot of time otherwise spent pushing the Home button. And if you decide multitasking gestures aren’t for you, just hit the Home button the old-fashioned way and tap your way through to Settings→General→Multitasking Gestures→Off.

IT’S A BUSY WORLD and everybody needs a little help sometimes. Imagine how great it would be if you could ask the iPad to take on a task, like automatically adding your next dentist appointment to your calendar or firing up a text message to remind your spouse to bring home cat treats after work—just like those people with iPhones running Apple’s Siri virtual assistant software.

Now, the good news for many iPad owners: Siri has arrived. To use this sassy little helper program with the big personality, you need:

Once you have all that, you’re ready to make Siri work for you. The feature is turned on and ready to go by default if you’re running iOS 6, but if you want to make sure, visit Home→Settings→General→Siri and confirm that Siri is set to On.

Using Siri

On the surface, summoning Siri is simple: hold down the iPad’s Home button until you hear two beeps and the program appears on-screen with a cheery “What can I help you with?” note above a microphone. This indicates that Siri is here and ready to serve.

Now it’s your turn to tell her what you want. Since Siri works with a huge number of apps within iOS 6 (including the Clock, Reminders, and more) you have plenty of options. You can have Siri:

• Show you directions to a place on a map

• Post a comment to Facebook or Twitter, or send a Message

• Look up movie times—and even buy tickets online through Fandango

• Search the Web

• Check your calendar

• Play a song by a certain artist

In fact, Siri can do so much, you may not know where to start. If you don’t know what you want—but would just like to see what Siri can do—tap on the right side of the screen. This brings up a list of the things Siri does, with short examples of how to ask for them properly so you’re schooled in Siri-speak.

Once you ask for something, Siri does her best to perform the task or find the information requested. If she can’t, she apologizes politely in her sincere little lady robot voice. (And don’t ask her to “open the pod bay doors,” either—she’s a little sensitive about HAL 9000 jokes.)

Customizing Siri

Siri works best when she understands who you are, where you live, who you’re related to, and other little details about your life. When the program has this information, you can say, “Call my wife” or “What good pizza places are near work?” and Siri goes into action because it already knows who to call and where you work.

To add this information, tap Home→Settings→General→Siri→My Info. You’ll see your own card from your Contacts list, where you can fill in your home and work addresses. If you use Siri as a guide to show you nearby businesses, you need to have the iPad’s Location Services feature (Sounds) activated; just go to Settings→Privacy→Location Services→On so Siri knows where you are.

Siri is powerful—but she can also use up a lot of power. To turn her off when your iPad’s battery is feeling low, go to Home→Settings→General→Siri→Off.

TYPING IS ONE WAY to enter text, but if you have an iPad from 2012 and at least iOS 5 running on it, you can add text to apps like Mail, Notes, and Reminders just by talking. Yes, the iPad takes dictation, and you can use it with chatty third-party apps, too, like Facebook and Twitter. In iOS 6, Siri assumes full command of your dictation needs. (And if you have an iPad from 2012 and haven’t updated it to iOS 6 yet, see Update Your iPad’s Software for instructions.)

To use the built-in Siri and the dictation feature, you need a couple of things:

Once you do, you’re ready to dictate. Siri doesn’t work for every language, but you can speak up in American/British/Australian English, German, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, and a few Spanish and Chinese dialects by adjusting your Siri preferences in the iPad’s Settings area (General).

Using Dictation on the iPad

When you’re ready to speak your mind into an iPad app, tap into the text-entry area (like the body of a Mail message) to summon the keyboard. Tap the microphone icon () next to the space bar. Don’t see the anywhere? Make sure your iPad is connected to the Internet, because the microphone doesn’t reveal itself without ’Net access. Also note: dictation doesn’t work for web addresses.

Once you tap the microphone (circled above), start speaking in a clear, loud voice into the front of the iPad. If you need to add punctuation to your recitation, just say the name of the character you need, like period, comma, question mark, quote (or unquote), and slash. Say new paragraph when you need one, or at sign when you’re addressing a message and need a curly little @.

The iPad quietly records your voice as you dictate. When you finish, tap again. The iPad pauses (and displays a set of glowing purple dots in the text-entry location) as it sends your words out for text conversion. Then it plops all the spoken-word text onto the screen.

If you need to pick up where you left off, tap again and continue talking. You can later use the keyboard in traditional finger-based mode to correct any errors in the iPad’s transcription.

Dictation Options for Older iPads

Got an older iPad and want it to transcribe your words when you speak? Visit the App Store (detailed in Chapter 8) and type dictation into the search box. A few dozen apps pop up, including the free, well-reviewed Dragon Dictation (shown below). Or search for Vlingo, an iPhone app that scales up to iPad size and offers some virtual-assistant help for commanding apps by voice.

IT MAY TAKE A few days to get used to typing on the keyboard’s slick glass surface, but most people get the hang of it pretty quickly with the tablet on a table, a lap, or propped up in its case. But if you’re one of those types who likes to hold the iPad at all times, you probably get hand cramps from trying to balance the tablet on your fingers while pecking out letters awkwardly in thumb-yoga stretches—unless you have an iPad Mini and small mitts.

Stretch no more! Thanks to the iPad’s handy split keyboard, you can virtually yank the keyboard in half and type much more comfortably on two chunks of keys positioned much closer to your thumbs.

To split your keyboard in two, put a finger on each half of the ’board and drag your digits in the opposite direction from each other. The keyboard senses this move and splits in two, with a batch of keys clinging to either side of the screen—and in much easier reach of your tapping thumbs.

If you have your hands full of iPad and can’t do the two-finger split, just tap the little ridged area on the Keyboard button (circled right) to get an Undock/Split menu you can tap with one finger. After you tap Undock, press your thumb on the ridges of keyboard key to drag the ’board vertically up and down the screen until it’s in a comfortable place.

You can use the split keyboard in either portrait or landscape orientations. Once you finish typing and want to re-join the two halves of the keyboard, put a finger on each set of keys, and slide them toward the middle of the screen. Or just tap “Dock and Merge” (circled below).

IT’S OKAY, YOU CAN admit it. You tried and tried and tried, but you just can’t deal with that flat-glass typing surface. Your fingers long for the tactile feel of softly clicking Chiclet keys, especially when you work on huge documents or programs that require lots of text entry.

If this describes you, fear not. You can get the comfort of a physical keyboard, and you even have a couple of options.

Bluetooth Keyboard

The iPad conveniently has a Bluetooth chip tucked inside it, so you can use the slab with a Bluetooth-enabled wireless keyboard, like the stylish $69 model Apple makes (shown here), or a more portable variation, like the $99 ZAGG Logitech iPad keyboard-and-case combo. To get the iPad ready for a wireless keyboard in iOS 6, choose Settings→Bluetooth→On (or, in iOS 5, choose Settings→General→Bluetooth→On). Then follow the instructions that came with your particular keyboard to pair your ’board and iPad—this usually means holding down a button until something blinks.

The iPad looks around for nearby devices and should find the keyboard singing its Bluetooth siren song. When you see the keyboard in the Devices list, select it and type in any passkey numbers it requests to complete the connection (check your keyboard manual for the code). The Bluetooth icon () and keyboard name appear on-screen to announce their pairing. To go back to the virtual keyboard, choose Settings→Bluetooth→Off (or Settings→General→Bluetooth→Off in iOS 5) or press the Eject key on the Bluetooth keyboard.

IF AMERICAN ENGLISH IS your only language, you can skip these next two pages. But if, over the course of your iPadding day, you find yourself communicating in French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Cherokee, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, Canadian French, or British English, you can add a keyboard layout that reflects the standards of those languages. You can also use the built-in Emoji keyboard to add cute little smiley faces and other icons to text.

To give your iPad some global input:

Once you add and configure your new keyboards, call them up when you need to leap into a memo in Dutch or Japanese:

You switch keyboards two ways:

Then, type away. To switch back to English or another keyboard language, go to the globe.

THE IPAD’S ABILITY TO move text and images around within a document (or between documents) is useful, but it’s not the tablet’s most intuitive feature. And no, you can’t use Ctrl-C to copy something because the keyboard has no Control key. Never fear, here’s how you move text and images from place to place—or program to program:

Make a mistake and wish you could undo what you just did? Tap the key and hit Undo on the numbers keyboard. Or just give the iPad a quick shake and tap the Undo Paste or Undo Typing button that appears.

But be careful when you shake that iPad—you don’t want to send your $500 high-tech tablet flying across the room because you pasted the word “celery” on the wrong line of a recipe.

In addition to the Cut, Copy, and Paste options in apps where you can edit text (like Notes or Mail), you can replace a misspelled word with one spelled correctly. Or you can replace one word with a different word altogether. To get to these options, double-tap or select a word on-screen. When the Cut | Copy | Paste | Suggest | Define box appears, tap Suggest. The iPad offers up a few alternate words, as shown below. If you see the word you meant to type in the list, tap it to replace the text.

But enough about text—want to copy a photo or video into a message-in-progress or some other program? Hold your finger down on the screen until the Copy button pops up, as shown in the screenshot below. Tap Copy, create an email, and then tap the message body to get a Paste button. Tap it to insert your image or video into the file.

To copy multiple items, like pictures in a photo album, tap the Edit button in the top-right corner. Next, tap the photos you want to copy; blue checkmarks () appear in the thumbnail corners to indicate your selection. Tap the Share button on the top-left side of the toolbar, tap Copy, and switch to the program where you want to deposit your pics (like an open mail message). Then press the glass until you see the Paste button.

AS YOU MAY HAVE noticed from tapping text to cut, copy, paste, or replace misspelled words, a Define option can also appear in the pop-up menu. This launches the iPad’s global dictionary, a built-in reference that works with most apps. It defines words in real time, so you need an Internet connection for it to work.

Using the dictionary is easy—when you see a word you don’t recognize in a text-oriented app like Safari or Mail, tap it twice (or press and hold it for a second) to select it. Then tap the Define option from the pop-up menu. The dictionary quickly looks up the word and presents the definition right there in a pop-up box.

Some words may have long and varied definitions, so flick down the box to see all the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms. And some words, like “superior,” may double as place names, as in Superior, Wisconsin. Tap the background text you started from to dismiss the dictionary and continue reading, armed with your newfound knowledge.

ONCE YOU GET YOUR iPad fully loaded, you may actually want to find something on it—a certain song in your music library, a calendar appointment, or someone’s address, for example. If you have 128 gigabytes of stuff on a bulging iPad, you may not want to wade around looking for a nugget of information. You can, however, shine the Spotlight on it.

Spotlight is the iPad’s built-in tool for introspection and self-searching. It lets you scan your iPad for words, apps, phrases, names, titles, and more. You can call up songs, appointments, email messages with directions to a house party, and all sorts of other things. You get to Spotlight a few ways:

Once you’re on the Spotlight screen, type the name or words you’re looking for (“Doctor Lee” or “Harrigan” or “Gettysburg”). Spotlight searches as you type, narrowing its results as you continue. On the results screen, tap any item to open it. You can even launch one of your apps from the list—which is a great way to fire up programs after you fill up your 11 Home screens with app icons and don’t have any place to display new ones. Flick to the bottom of the list, and you also get the option to search for your topic on the Web and Wikipedia via Safari. And in iOS 6, you can get Siri to do the searching for you (Command Your iPad with Siri).

YOU PRETTY MUCH HAVE two ways to print messages, photos, and other documents from your iPad: apps or AirPrint.

The App Store (Chapter 8) offers dozens of utility programs that let you print files from your iPad on your home printer. Some may be more elegant than others, but odds are you can find something in the Store that’ll have you printing for less than $10.

If you’ve never searched the Store for an app, Search for Apps shows you how; type print into the App Store’s search box and go to town. When you find an app that appeals to you from its description and reviews, buy it, install it, and follow the app’s directions for printing.

The other way to print uses Apple’s AirPrint technology. This approach can be more expensive—you need a compatible printer—but ultimately easier to use because the technology is built into your iPad, so you’re not at the mercy of a third-party app.

AirPrint now works with more than 75 printer models—many of them made by HP, with assorted models from Brother, Canon, Epson, and Lexmark playing along. (You can see a full list at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4356.)

Once you have a compatible printer, here’s how AirPrint works:

Once you configure AirPrint the first time, the iPad remembers your printer and offers it as the default choice the next time you need to make paper.

Managing Print Jobs

Like other computers, the iPad shows you how many print jobs you have lined up. It also lets you cancel a job if you change your mind—or realize you told the iPad to print 12 copies instead of two.

To see your print queue, double-click the Home button and swipe through the apps panel until you see the Print Center icon (circled at right). Tap the icon to see a summary of your print job (or jobs) waiting in line for its trip to the printer. Tap Cancel Printing to stop a job and save that ink and paper for another time.

Tip

Have no plans to get an AirPrint printer and don’t want to deal with apps? The Web has its own creative workarounds if you don’t mind fiddling. One is Netputing’s AirPrint Activator for Mac OS X (netputing.com/airprintactivator), which lets iOS devices see and use a network printer; you can find a Windows version with a quick Web search.