Save Time! How To Get Started With Apple Shortcuts

0:00 I'm a big fan of Apple shortcuts if you aren't familiar it's a time saving Widget the combined sequences to generate a practical action there are official Apple created shortcuts and user created ones too some shortcuts even use automations to activate so you never even need to touch the screen there are hundreds of shortcuts available in the Apple shortcuts gallery in this video I'll walk you through some shortcuts that I feel seniors would benefit from thanks so much for tuning in to Ellen's tips for iOS if you find Value in the video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel let's get started shortcuts are now pre-installed on any

0:45 device using iOS or iPad OS 13. if you're on an older version you can download it from the App Store it's available for your iPhone iPad and your Mac I'll start with a few simple shortcuts that you might find useful and if you stick around till the end I'll walk you through a shortcut that will help keep track of all the books you've read during the year using the notes app let's start by opening the shortcuts app and you'll see it located right here if you don't see it if you just pull it on on your screen and start to search for it it will appear and then you can just tap on shortcuts to open it when I open shortcuts right now I'm in the gallery

1:31 area where all of the Apple created shortcuts and some user created shortcuts are stored and you can go through and search for these search for different shortcuts that you might find useful what we're going to do today is I'm going to create a couple of shortcuts and use some shortcuts that I've created for you and all of the shortcuts you'll find links for them in the video description so if you're not seeing this sidebar here I have my iPad turned in landscape mode but if you're not seeing it if you just tap on this icon in the upper left corner you'll see the little uh menu area of your shortcuts app and so you can create your

2:18 own folders I have some that I've created one called my shortcuts another one called easy shortcuts for seniors which is some of the shortcuts I'm going to share today and you can create a folder by just tapping on the plus sign giving the folder a name you can even choose an icon for that folder and then you would just tap add to move a a shortcut from one folder to another so if I come into all my shortcuts and I just grab a shortcut I can drag it over and drop it into a folder that I created and then that shortcut will be added to that folder so that's how to use this

3:04 sidebar in the shortcuts app the first shortcut we're going to create is going to allow you to silence your phone in a particular situation or location so to create the shortcut the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that I want to add it to this easy shortcuts for senior folder I'm just going to click on that and then I'm going to tap the plus sign in the upper right corner and it brings me into the action menu for the shortcuts so the first thing I want to do is locate uh the Do Not Disturb action I want to use so I'm going to go ahead and just put in do not

3:50 disturb and it comes up by setting a focus because do not disturb is part of the focuses in uh or on your Apple iPhone now to bring the action over to this menu I just drag it I pull it and I drag it over and now it says turn do not disturb off well I want to turn it on so I'm going to click on that and when I do it it says turn do not disturb on and then it says until and if if I leave it as it is meaning until I turn it off but I don't want that to happen I want it to turn off automatically

4:36 when I leave a location so I'm going to tap on turn off and you'll see you have a few options I can do it based on time I can turn it off when I leave a location or when an event ends or I can ask each time but we want this to be automated so we want it to turn off when I leave a location so I'm going to tap on I leave and we've just created our first shortcut but we want to give that shortcut a name so up here where it says set Focus because it named it after the action we used hit the little down arrow tap on rename

5:22 and I'm just going to tap in D and D for do not disturb until I leave and so that is going to be the new name I can also give this a uh an icon I can choose an icon so I'm going to tap choose icon I'm going to also choose a color so I'm going to choose purple and then I am going to look for uh I'm gonna use just the car location so like basically it'll kind of remind me that once I get in my car and leave a location this it's going to turn off do not disturb so now we have our shortcut ready to go

6:07 and so how do you trigger that shortcut well a couple of ways you could come in to the focused app let me come back to the shortcuts area where so here it is I could come in here and just tap on it and that would trigger it so if I tap on it it's now been triggered and you can tell it's been triggered because you're going to see the little do not disturb icon the half moon icon up here by your battery or if you swipe down from the upper right corner of your screen to come into the control center you're going to see the Do Not Disturb icon is on there as well so now I'm at home and this Focus will stay on until I leave so

6:55 when would you want to use something like this maybe at the doctor's office maybe at the movies so anywhere where you don't want to be disturbed herbed but you don't want to have to remember to turn that off when you leave it will automatically turn off using this shortcut so let me come back into the Do Not Disturb I hit the more icon let me show you that again I tapped on the more icon to open the menu and the actions so that you can see them I'm going to come over here to this eye or information area and there's a couple of ways that you can trigger this I can add this shortcut to my home screen so I

7:42 don't always have to go in to the shortcuts app to find it so you could on your home screen have a page that is just shortcuts that you use so I'm going to tap add to home screen so that I can add this it shows me a preview of it and I'm just going to say go ahead and add I'm also so now you'll see that that shortcut has been added so I don't have to hunt for it I don't have to find it I can just locate it on my home screen tap on it and it will trigger that shortcut for now I'm going to swipe down from the upper right corner of my screen and I'm going to turn that Focus mode off because I don't need that shortcut running while I'm at home so now I've

8:29 created that shortcut I'm going to come back into the shortcuts app and show you a couple of other features in here you can put it in a share sheet if you want it in a share sheet this particular shortcut I would leave as added to the home screen you can show it on your Apple watch so you could trigger it from your Apple watch if you wanted to I'm going to tap on privacy I'm going to leave this on to allow it running when locked and in this setup area I could add things here to allow anyone who's downloading this option or this shortcut to know how to use it for right now I'm going to leave all of that blank and so now we've just created our

9:15 first shortcut do not disturb until I leave and you'll find a link for this shortcut in the description of the video the next shortcut we're going to create using a shortcut from the gallery area of the shortcuts app and we're going to create a quick image collage and so it's pretty simple we're going to search for that shortcut I'm going to tap there's a lot of photo shortcuts so I'm going to type in photo and the one I want is photo grid but there's a lot of different photography shortcuts and you can take a look at those but for right now I'm going to tap on Photo Grid and it's going to ask me to add that

10:01 shortcut well I already have it added and but let's go ahead and add it again so I'm going to tap add and it's going to tell me replace or keep both I'm just going to say go ahead and keep both for right now and I'm going to find that under all shortcuts and it should be the first shortcut that's located that's the most recent so again I'm going to up on this the more icon just to show you there's all kinds of different actions that are being used to create this shortcut we don't need to know anything about them because we're going to use the shortcut as it is and again if I tap on the I you can add the shortcut

10:46 directly to your home screen so I'll go ahead and do that so that it's added to my home screen and there it is and so if I want to run this shortcut all I have to do is tap on it and so it's going to come in and it's going to bring me right into my uh photo library and I'm going to go ahead and just choose an album and grab it's I can grab uh I think up to four photos maybe more but I'm just gonna grab four and there we go I'm going to say add it's going to create this Ford I think it's going to be four digit collage there it is and you can use markup if you want to

11:35 add or remove things you know you can you know add text or color or whatever and then you can also come into this image area and if you want to save this collage you can save it to your files or to your photos you can export it the coolest thing though is you can share it so if I tap on the share icon now I have the option to share it in in messages or mail or via airdrop to whomever I want to so that's a photo grid and I you know I find that useful for people so that's how to create a photo grid shortcut let's do one more shortcut before we get on to the bonus shortcut but in this shortcut what I want to do

12:21 is remind myself to charge my iPhone when it gets below 40 percent or my iPad it doesn't matter so I've created a shortcut but it isn't very useful if I have to run it automatically it makes no sense because I'd have to wait for my battery to get to 40 and then run the shortcut we want we want the shortcut to tell us when our battery is below 40 percent so I've already created the shortcut let me tap on the more icon so you can see so basically what do shortcuts going to do is it's going to get me the device model so it's going to tell me whether it's my iPhone or my iPad

13:07 it's also going to speak and it's going to say it's time to charge whatever the device is the iPhone or the iPad this will work with any of your devices and then it's going to show an alert to me on my iPhone or iPad it's going to say it's time to charge so if I ran this shortcut right now you'll see what it would look like it's a charge iPad so it gives me this reminder at the top of my iPad and it says it's time to charge my iPad if I run this same shortcut on my iPhone it's going to say it's time to charge your iPhone so I'm going to just tap on OK I've got the message but I want this to run automatically so I need to set up an automation using the

13:55 shortcut reminder to charge so let me come back into the shortcuts area and tap on automation I'm going to tap on create personal automation because that's what we need and this time we're going to find a battery automation so we want to use this battery level I'm going to tap on that and I want this to tell me when my battery level drops below 50 percent and I can change that I can change that to 40 or to 30 or 75 I'm going to put it at 40 for right now and I'm going to tap on next well now we need to create an action because we want this automation to run a shortcut so I'm going to tap on

14:42 ADD action and I'm going to search for shortcuts and I see one here it should say run shortcut there it is and that's the action that I want to use I want it to run a shortcut so I'm going to tap on that and now it's been added and I have to tell it what shortcut to run so I'm going to tap on shortcut and I know that it was called remind me to charge so I'm going to tap in remind and there it is I'm going to tap on reminder to charge and I'm going to tap on next and now when my battery level Falls below 40 percent to automatically going to run this

15:28 shortcut but I don't want it to ask me every time I just want it to run so I'm going to turn that toggle switch off and I'm going to say don't ask and now I'm going to say done and now when my battery level Falls below 40 percent this shortcut is going to run and notify me that my battery level is below 40 and I need to charge my device now this bonus shortcut is going to allow you to run a shortcut using the share sheet option and we are going to run this shortcut and I'm going to tap on the more icon and again for the most part you are not going to have to do anything

16:15 with this except for one thing at the end where it says books 2023 you're gonna have to add this into your notes app so that's what we're going to do we're going to start with this so let's come into the notes app and you're going to see that I have created a folder called books I've read so that's the first thing you need to do is create a new folder by coming down to the lower left corner and create a folder called books I've read and then inside that I created a note for 2023 and I've already created a note for 2024 even though there's nothing in

17:01 there but these are the books I've started to read in 2023 so now I want to show you how to use this shortcut to get your books into uh this folder and what it does is it gives you a link to these books so that if you click on this link it's going to take you to the Amazon web page of this book do you need to buy the book on Amazon no uh you can be using a hardback a paperback a Kindle book it doesn't matter all this is going to do is give you a link to the books you've read so that if you want to go back and look at them again and read the descriptions you'll find it all on Amazon so let me show you how it works

17:48 so first things first create a folder and inside that folder create a note that says books 2023 so if I wanted to I could go ahead and create another note and call this one books 2020 five and so now I have three notes created in there already ahead of time and now I need to come back into the shortcuts app and make sure that you change this to tap on that and you want to make sure that you choose this particular note so

18:37 in this case right now we're on 2023 so I want to choose this particular note next year you'll come back into this same shortcut and just change this to books 2024 and then the following year you'll change it to books 2025. so now let me show you how simple this is and how it works so if I go to Amazon so I'm going to open and I'm going to go to Amazon and I'm just going to grab a book that I have here that's and I'm going to choose the share sheet here and when I do I'm going to find the name of that shortcut which is books I've read so let me find that

19:26 there it is books I've read and if I tap on that the shortcut is going to run the first time you run it it's going to ask you for permissions and if it does say allow and at the second permission say allow now if I come back into the notes app and go to 2023 there's that book that I just added last one to know I usually just come in here and separate them a little bit so that I can see them easier and if I wanted to get back to that book I would just tap on it and it'll immediately take me to that web page so all you're doing is using Amazon

20:12 to link to the book that you've read it's not that you have to purchase it from there it doesn't matter you can read a paperback it makes no difference but you're using this to keep track of all of the books that you've read so that's it that's you know you just want to come in and create a folder called books I've read and then the notes will be the years uh of the books that you're reading and so right now we're on 2023 so those are listed there and in the shortcuts app all you have to do is come into the books I've read by tapping on the more icon and then at the bottom just

20:59 changing this tap on it and then choose the note that you've that you want it to connect to so this year I choose books 2023 and it will be added to that year so that's how to keep track of all of your books one thing I want to add to this bonus shortcut is that as you can see it says here I have the toggle switch turned on for show and share sheet because the only way for this shortcut to run is to run it from the Amazon page so you go to you have to go to your book first on Amazon tap on the share icon and then choose the shortcut to run and that's how you add it to your notes app but you

21:48 must have the share sheet toggled on there's a link for this particular shortcut in the video description and all you'll need to do is link it to the book and the note that you created in the notes app and then use the share sheet to add your book one more thing I know this is getting a little long but I want to show you how to delete a shortcut if you push and hold on any shortcut you can go ahead and tap on delete this shortcut your other option to make sure that all of your shortcuts are synced on all of your devices is to come into the settings app and then scroll down until you see shortcuts

22:35 tap on that toggle on the switch that says iCloud sync and one more thing to check is to tap on your name at the top tap on iCloud tap on show all and then scroll down until you see shortcuts and make sure that toggle switch is turned on and all of your shortcuts will be synced across all of your devices shortcuts are fun and can prove useful in your everyday life let me know if you're using shortcuts where if you find the shortcuts that I gave you useful let me know in the comments section thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time