How To Undo On The iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the different ways you can Undo on an iPhone.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So on a computer when you're doing work and you want to Undo the last action you usually use Command Z or Edit, Undo. But you can't do those things on an iPhone. Instead there are several gestures that you can use to Undo your last action. So as an example here let's start off in the Notes App. If I want to Undo the last thing I typed, which is the word Test, I could do it in several different ways. Three of them are gestures involving three fingers. 

The first one I want to show you is by taking three fingers and swiping quickly to the left in the center of the screen. So it is important you place your three fingers in the center of the screen, not too far to the left and not too far to the right although it really doesn't matter how close to the top and bottom they are. Then you quickly want to swipe to the left. Let me show you. I'm going to put my three fingers here and do a quick swipe like that. You could see not only did it Undo the last thing I typed but the word Undo appeared at the top of the screen to let me know that's what was going on. 

Now if you want to Redo you can do the opposite of that. Three fingers and a quick swipe to the right in the middle of the screen. It's really easy to get this wrong by having one of your three fingers not touch at the same time as the other two. Or maybe one of your three fingers being too close to the left or right side of the screen to be detected when you first put them down.

Another way to accomplish this is to simply tap once with three fingers in the middle. This is a little bit easier to do. Just do a tap like that and now at the top of the screen you get some tools including an Undo button. I can use that to Undo. Then notice on the right now there's a Redo button. You also have other tools there. Cut, Copy, and Paste which could be useful. 

Another way to do it is to  double tap with three fingers in the middle. That will do an Undo just like swiping to the left. You have to do it really quickly though. If you pause too much between the taps it won't recognize it as a double tap. 

Now the Notes app has an unusual way to Undo. That's to use the Markup Tools. If you tap this button to go into Markup Tools you can then draw on the screen and create a sketch. But in addition to that there's a button at the top. You can use that to Undo the last thing you typed. Then tap Done to exit the Markup Tool.

All the three finger gestures work in other apps as well. So here I am in Mail and I've just typed something. I can swipe to the left with three fingers and to the right. I can tap with three fingers and bring up the tools at the top and I can double tap with three fingers to Undo. Pages also allows these three-finger gestures. You can do a swipe to the left. You can Redo with a swipe to the right. You can single tap and bring up the Controls. Although double tapping with three fingers doesn't seem to work as well in Pages. It usually brings up the controls at the top or select some text. Pages is a good example of an app that has a dedicated Undo button. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have this and lots of third party apps have it as well. Just look at the top there and you can see the Undo button. I can tap that to Undo. Then sometimes there's a Redo button as well. In fact if I tap and hold you could see it gives me the option down here to Undo typing or Redo typing. 

Now it's not all just about typing text. This works in other situations as well. For instance here I am in Reminders and I'm going to Delete an item. So let's say I want to Undo that. I can use these three-finger gestures to do it. So three fingers swipe to the left. Three finger swipe to the right. I can tap with three fingers and get the Undo controls here at the top as well. 

Now, of course, another way you can Undo is to use a very unusual gesture. That's to shake the iPhone. So I've typed something here and I'm going to do a quick shake. You could see it's going to come up and ask if I want to Undo. I'll say Yes. Now if I do it again it will actually come up and say Undo or Redo. Now this method has been around for a lot longer than the three-finger gestures. So if you have an older version of iOS this may be the only way you have to Undo. Also some older apps or apps that are just not taking advantage of the new three-finger gestures may only have the Shake to Undo option. 

Now note there is a way to turn this off. If you go into Settings, Accessibility, and Touch there's an option here to Shake to Undo. You can turn that off. So if it's not working for you perhaps you have this switched to Off. 

So basically there are five ways to Undo in the iPhone. There's the three-finger swipe to the left. There's three-finger tap. Three-finger double tap. There's very often a dedicated Undo button in many apps. There's also Shake to Undo. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.