Keyboard shortcuts for Keynote on iPad

There is no doubt that today more and more users use their iPad as if it were a computer, and this includes making Pages documents or Keynote presentations. It can be a little weird if you don’t have the help of an external keyboard or a device like the Apple Pencil, and doing everything manually can be awkward.

The most practical functions

If you have an external keyboard connected to your iPad, you can use keyboard shortcuts to quickly perform many tasks in Keynote. To use a keyboard shortcut, press all the keys in the shortcut at the same time. You can hold down the Command key on the external keyboard to display a list of shortcuts for the selected item on the slide, such as text or a table.

There are several types of shortcuts that you can enhance depending on what you need and what you want to do. Here we leave you with some quite useful shortcuts that you can start doing in your day to day for Keynote presentations.

• General: These are the simplest functions you can perform with your iPad keyboard. You may know some of them, but
  • • • • Create a new presentation (opens the template chooser): Command + N
        • Play a presentation: Option + Command + P
        • Show or hide presenter notes: Shift + Command + P.
        • Enter or exit Edit Slide Layouts view: Shift + Command + E
        • Add a new slide layout (from Edit Slide Layouts view): Shift-Command-N
• Use the slide navigator: To use the slide navigator shortcuts below, you must first select a slide in the slide navigator on the left.
  • • • • • Add a new slide: Shift + Command + N
          • Duplicate selected slide: Command + D or Option + drag
          • Indent selected slide to the right: Tab
          • Move indented slide to the left: Shift + Tab
          • Skip a slide so it doesn’t show in a presentation, or show a skipped slide: Shift-Command-H
          • Insert an equation: Option + Command + E

• Play a slideshow: If it’s time to present your presentation, with these shortcuts you can move from one slide to another without having to do it with the screen of the iPad itself.
  • • • • • • Play a presentation: Option + Command + P
            • Go to the next slide or build: Right Arrow or Down Arrow
            • Go to previous slide: Left Arrow or Up Arrow
            • Go to the next build or slide without animation: Shift + Right Arrow
            • Go to the next slide without builds or animations: Shift + Down Arrow or Shift + Page Down
            • Show or hide presenter notes: Shift + Command + P