iOS 5 keyboard shortcuts on the iPad

There are some very useful hidden iOS 5 features, and one of them is the ability to make keyboard shortcuts. You can assign shortcuts in your keyboard settings, that will allow you to quickly fill in commonly used words or phrases. For example, I can assign the letters OMW to the phrase on my way, and BRB to be right back. I’ve been saving myself tons of agony, by saving my email address as a three letter shortcut. I no longer have to type that big string of letters into submission fields within apps or web pages. This will be a productivity feature, that will increase your overall productivity, and save you tons of time and frustration, by eliminating the need to constantly type words or phrases that you use on a regular basis. The closest comparison to what this feature represents, is an app called “Text Expander Touch”. It’s a very popular app that allows the expansion of text, through the use of pre-assigned shortcuts. I’m thrilled that we can get this functionality from a native feature within iOS, and I figured I’d share the tutorial with you guys :-)

Here are the steps for how to make keyboard shortcuts in iOS 5:

  1. Open the settings application on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5.
  2. Scroll down and tap on the general section.
  3. Scroll down and tap on the keyboard section.
  4. Scroll down and tapp on “Add New Shortcut…”.
  5. Enter the phrase you’d like to make a shortcut for.
  6. Assign a shortcut to the phrase you made in step 5.
  7. Marvel at your new creation ;-)

Now you can open up any application and test your shortcut by typing it into any text field! This is a pretty powerful feature, and one that most people are not aware of yet. We hope you put it to good use, and that we have helped you to regain countless hours of frustration from repeatedly typing in repeated information on your iOS device.

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