This article illustrates how to add widgets to your iPad in iPadOS 15 and higher. It also shows how to personalise these useful tools to give you with brief pieces of information and shortcuts to key functions that will make your iPad even more useful.
You’ll need iPadOS 15 to utilise widgets on the iPad as detailed in this article. While iPadOS 15 won’t be available until Fall 2021, you may join Apple’s public beta programme to get a head start.
Link to Apple’s public beta programme – https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
What Are the Steps to Adding Widgets to My iPad Home Screen?
Adding widgets to your iPad home screen will feel quite familiar if you’ve done so on your iPhone. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do it; it’s quite simple. Here’s what you should do:
- Any “empty” part of the iPad home screen may be tapped and held on (i.e., not the Dock and not an app).
- Tap + in the upper left corner when applications start to jiggle.
- From the bottom of the screen, the widgets menu displays. Swipe up and down on the left-hand list to see what widgets are available. In the Search Widgets box, you can also look for widgets.
- Select the widget you’d want to add.
- The majority of widgets come in a variety of sizes and forms. This allows them to be arranged in different ways on your home screen and to display different content. Swipe from left to right to see all of the widget’s variants and settings.
- Tap Add Widget after you’ve found the widget variant you want.
- You may next add other widgets, relocate the widget you just added to a different position (see the next section for more information), or touch Done.
How Do You Customize iPad Widgets?
You’ve now added a widget to your iPad’s home screen by following those instructions. However, you’ll almost certainly want to alter your widgets, or at the very least their placement. If that’s the case, you have a few choices:
- Moving Widgets – Just like you arrange apps on the iPad, you get to choose where on your home screen your widgets reside. This is an improvement over iPadOS 14, which only had a left-hand column for widgets. To relocate widgets, press and hold > release when applications begin to shake > drag and drop the widget to your desired place (to transfer to a different home screen page, drag off the screen) > tap Done.
- Widget Customization – Most widgets allow you to change some of the data they show. Tap and hold the iPad widget to edit it > tap Edit Widget in the pop-out menu > choose from the available customization choices > tap the home screen to save it.
- Widget Deletion – Decided you don’t want a widget any longer? Remove it by tapping and holding on the widget > selecting Remove Widget from the pop-up menu > tap remove next from the pop up window.
- Smart Stacks – Smart Stacks are a unique widget type. They’re not just one widget; instead, they “stack” a lot of them in the area that a single widget would take up. Then you swipe through the stack of widgets. They’re clever because the iPad strives to understand your behaviours and dynamically presents info and widgets to you. Smart Stacks are added in the same way as regular widgets, with the exception that in step 3 you pick Smart Stack. Customize your Smart Stack by pressing and holding > Edit Stack > dragging and dropping widgets to reorder them in the stack or swiping right to left and hitting Delete to remove a widget from the Stack.