Hi, it’s Jacob here. Now, I make no secret of it – Freeform is one of my favourite apps on the iPad, and I use it for just about everything. But sometimes your boards can get quite large and quite unwieldy, and it would be great to have a way to quickly jump to certain parts of the board.

Well, you can do that using the Scenes feature in Freeform.

So here I’ve got quite a large board that I use for events and introductions to myself and what I’ve done in my career, and I’ve got four distinct sections. I want to have each one of those as a scene that I can jump to, which would be much easier and quicker than zooming and scrolling and trying to find the bit I want.

What I’m going to do is zoom right into the centre of my screen and frame it on the iPad in exactly the way I want it to be saved. Then, in the bottom left-hand corner, I’m going to tap on the Scenes button here. If you can’t see the Scenes button, tap the star icon and that will expand it.

You’ll then see the list of scenes. Right now, I’ve got no scenes saved, so I can tap Add Scene. As soon as I do that, you’ll see the whole screen shrink into the corner, just like taking a screenshot. That means everything currently in view has been saved as a scene.

Now when I tap on the Scenes button again in the bottom left-hand corner, I can see there’s one scene saved, with a little preview of what was on my screen. I can tap the three dots to delete it if I need to, or rename it. I’m going to rename mine Hi, I’m Jacob, because that’s the centre of this board.

Next, I’ll zoom into the next part of my Freeform board. I can zoom in, zoom out and position it exactly how I want, and then I’ll add another scene just like before. I’ll quickly add a couple more scenes as well.

So I’ll zoom into the section above, add a new scene, then zoom into the top-left section and add another one. Now, in my Scenes list, I’ve got four different scenes saved. Of course, I can tap the three dots to rename them all. I’ll jump ahead here so you don’t have to watch me do that.

At this point, I can tap on any of those scene names and Freeform will jump straight to that exact part of the board for me.

Before we start properly using scenes for navigation, I’ll just show you that in the top left-hand corner we also have the option to print the scenes or create a PDF document from them. If I do this, I can save a PDF into the Files app with those specific views of my Freeform board. This is great for exporting and sharing projects, or just highlighting key sections you want to focus on.

But for me, the real value of Scenes is navigation. I can tap on any scene and Freeform will zoom and move to that exact part of the board instantly. If my scenes are in the right order, I can even use the forward and backward arrows to move between them, just like slides in a presentation.

If they’re not in the right order, I can bring up the list and drag and drop them to rearrange them, and then those arrows will work perfectly.

So that’s the Scenes feature in Freeform – a brilliant way to export parts of your board, turn a board into a presentation tool, or simply navigate large and complex Freeform documents.

If you want to see what else Freeform can do, check out my channel down below. There’s a whole playlist for getting started with Freeform, and make sure you subscribe while you’re there. I’ll see you next time for more iPad QuickTips.