When you have made all your edits and customisations, it is very important to remember to check and ensure you save the changes. Once you exit the app, if you have not saved the changes, they will be lost. Here we show you how to safely save all your edits.
When you edit your grid sets, you will be making changes to words, symbols, commands and more. Here we show you how to back up your user before making the edits that you then choose to do.
Here we will show you what an editing screen looks like in Grid for iPad and how to get there.
There are many circumstances where you may wish to be able to jump between different grid sets. For example: changing from an English grid set to a Spanish version, in order to have the correct prediction and spell-checking.
Grid for iPad has a Change grid set command that allows you to do exactly that, without having to go via Grid Explorer.
In Grid for iPad, you can create cells which play a sound or add a command to play a sound to an existing vocabulary cell. You can select from a library of sound effects, use a premade sound file or record a new sound to use.
Edit mode allows you to edit and personalise your grid sets, or create a new grid set from scratch.
The orange menu bar at the top of Grid for iPad whilst in Edit mode gives you quick access to common functions and different areas of Edit mode.
Cells that write, play sounds and jump are the foundations of creating your grid set. Other types of cell can interact with these cells to give your grid set even more functionality.
Making changes to any grid set requires you to be in Edit mode. Edit mode can be accessed at any time, in any grid set via the menu bar.
Write cells are programmed to write/speak a set word or phrase. These cells can be edited at any time to change what is written or spoken.
The symbols on any cell can be modified at any time, you may want to use a picture instead of a symbol, or use a symbol from a different library.
The write cell in Grid for iPad will speak out text and input into a chat writing area (if one is available). It is the foundation for most communication grid sets.
When creating grid sets, you may want to start from scratch with a new, blank grid set, rather than use another grid set as a template.
For longer sentences, you may want the Write cell label to be different to the actual sentence that is printed/spoken. You can change the cell label independently of the actual text, but this setting needs to be enabled first.
You can make a cell in Grid for iPad which has a label and a picture, but does not have any commands or actions. These are empty cells and could be useful if you wanted a cell just to provide information
Commands control everything a Grid for iPad grid set can do. A command needs to be added to a cell (button) to be activated.
Word lists are a convenient way of adding many words or phrases to a grid, using cells which automatically populate from a list.
Word lists can be sorted to a different order to make the list easier to navigate. This is especially useful for larger word lists or word lists containing words from multiple different categories.
When editing a word list, you may want to search for a particular word to change the picture, or remove it from the list entirely. You can also search to ensure you do not add a duplicate word into the same list.
Word lists are a useful way of adding a large amount of vocabulary to a particular grid. You may want to remove some words from the list if they are not used, or are in the wrong place.
When editing, you may want to select multiple cells to add commands to in one go. You can select multiple cells using the Select function in Edit mode.
You may wish to swap the locations of two cells to make one more obvious, or more centralised on the page. You may also want to move unused or rarely used content to the sides or restructure a list of words, such as family members.
All cells in Grid for iPad can be moved to a new location on the same page. If you move a cell on top of another, they will switch locations, or if there are empty cells available nearby, the cell will be pushed into those.
All cells in Grid for iPad can be resized to make them larger or smaller. It is useful to make the workspace cells (such as the chat writing area) larger, so the information they display is larger on the screen.
Adding grids to your grid set will give you more space to add content, or add additional categories or topics to your vocabulary.
When editing in Grid for iPad, you may want to pull in a grid from a previously created grid set for reference or to act as a template.
The number of rows and columns in your grid sets can be adjusted at any point. You can add more cells for additional content, or reduce the number of cells to make the remaining ones larger.
Once a cell has been made in Grid for iPad, you may want to copy it across to other grids, or duplicate it on the same grid.
Unused or unwanted grids can be removed from your grid set at any time without affecting the rest of your grid set.
When editing, you may want to make changes on multiple different grids, instead of finishing editing, jumping to the grids and then going back into Edit mode; you can follow the jump in Edit mode.
Whilst editing, it may be useful to make a copy of an existing grid in a grid set to use elsewhere. This can be used to make blank template grids with a basic layout to populate vocabulary grids easier.
Renaming grids is useful to ensure the grid title always corresponds to the content on the page. This will make future jump cells or additions easier, as you can search for and see what is currently there.
Styles dictate the appearance of your cells in Grid for iPad. It is possible to manually set the appearance of each cell individually, but for large grid sets this can be very time consuming. You can use Styles to set up the appearance for a type of cell, and then it apply it to all other cells of the same type.
In Grid for iPad, there are some style settings that you can change which will adjust every grid and cell within your grid set
For touch users, or users with emerging literacy, it may be important to move the word above the symbol, so the word is not covered when the cell is accessed.
For some grid sets, you may want to change the background colour (the colour between your cells) of the grid set. This may be to make the cells clearer, or you may wish to set a custom picture as the background instead.
The appearance of any cell in Grid for iPad can be modified to suit a set theme, or to use colours to help categorise different command types (i.e. jumps, settings, commands etc.)
Many of the commands in Grid for iPad have additional functions or settings that can be adjusted to change what the command does. Commands can also be removed after they have been added, or the order of commands changed to modify what the cell does when pressed.
If you are supporting a user, hiding cells is a good way to reveal content over time to help with progression, or to make the cell count lower at first to prepare for revealing the full grid set at a later date. Inaccessible cells are useful when making grid sets with titles or question cells, so they are not accessible next to the content or answers.
When making a grid set, you may create multiple different grids. The jump cell links the grids together, allowing you to jump from one to the next.
A grid command is a command that triggers every time a grid is opened. This can be used to help with background tasks such as clearing the chat writing area so the grid is clear and ready to be used.