iPad keyboard shortcuts.

[Husq250]

Hi, i'm having issues with my iPad keyboard shortcuts. I have about 5 shortcuts there that I cannot get rid of! One of them changes "the" to 'th"! You can imagine how irratiating that gets. I've deleted and deleted and deleted them. I don't know how they got there and they won't go away. They always come back. I suspect they need to be deleted directy from iCoud? Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[s2mikey]

You sure you've deleted them through the General Settings>Keyboard>Shortcuts area? I just did a quick test trying to remove one and it worked for me.

What version of iOS are you using?

 

[Husq250]

Yes i did. About 25 times now on 2 iPads and one iPhone. They come back sometimes in an hour, sometimes the next day. They just reappear. They've continued from IOS 7 and now on 8.1.3. and all the updates between.

 

[twerppoet]

Try turning off shortcuts on all devices, then delete the problem shortcuts on each device, then turn back on. Don't forget your Mac if you have one.

 

[Husq250]

Hi.

No Mac. I turned them off an all devices for a week or so. While it seemed to slow their return down significantly, they did come back I think twice between 2 devices. Now that it has been awhile I turned shortcuts back on. Sure as heck they have immediately come back to haunt me. I typed up a pharagraph for something a few minutes ago and had to delete them twice!

Im going to have a look to see if I can delete them in icloud on my pc if I can still remember how to turn that thing on. If that doesn't work I'm going to have to delete icloud on all my devices aren't I?

 

[twerppoet]

There is no way that I know of that they can be deleted directly from iCloud, but you are welcome to look around. You access iCloud directly by going to icloud.com in a web browser on a computer. There are no syncing controls there, just apps and files.

Let's try a slightly different approach.

Sign out of iCloud on all but one device, including your PC. I'm not familiar with Windows, but I understand there should be a control panel for iCloud syncing. There is nothing on the Mac that lets you turn off just keyboard syncing, but maybe there is on Windows.

Pick the most important device to 'not' sign out. Signing out then back into iCloud can cause some snafu's and might require enabling it again in individual apps. Let's minimize that.

Delete the shortcuts on all devices, including the one that is still signed in. If you can, let things ride for a couple days and see if they still come back on any of the devices. Note which if any they come back on. That might come in handy later.

If they do not come back on the signed in device, sign back in on each device one at a time, and wait between however long you can. Save the PC for last. Lets see if we can narrow down the device causing the problem, if the root cause is a device or the computer. If the root cause is iCloud, the shortcuts will probably come back while you are still using one device.

I hope this works, or at least offers some more clues.

Good luck.

 

[Husq250]

Well I finally got around to trying your suggestion. After a day or so all shortcuts came back on the one primary and all the rest of the devices as well. I did iTunes backups and wiped all devices clean. Slowly restored them from back up and all shortcuts came back within 2 days.( I deleted the shortcuts just before the backups)

I believe its an iCloud problem and I probably need a new iCloud account to resolve this.

 

[twerppoet]

A new iCloud account seems a bit extreme. I don't' suppose you have an Apple Store nearby? I doubt they would fix it first try, since they would insist on trying everything you've done again. That's just the way we techs are. But eventually, they should get to the things that you can't do for yourself.

Or, if you have AppleCare, and the iPad is less than two years old you have free tech support.

Other than that, I'm out of ideas.

 

[Husq250]

I have neither, Apple store nearby or AppleCare. Thanks for trying though.

One last idea I'm going to try is to take the device with the least important info on it and do some dropbox style backups for important information. Do a iTunes back up just to have the latest info, wipe it clean again but without restoring from backup. Load everything back on the manual way, skip iCloud and see how that goes for awhile.

 

[twerppoet]

Worth a try. Good luck.

 

[Husq250]

Well I thought I'd give an update just in case anyone else suffers this issue.

I went ahead and tried post 9 above and so far so good. Im no longer using iCloud backup but use iCloud for syncing calendars and tasks. After setting up the iPad as new this is working. Im slowly working on doing the same on the other iPad and iPhone. I've deleted and disabled the same on all 3 devices but only the one that got wiped clean and set up as a new device is working. At least I found a solution. Thanks for the help.

 

[twerppoet]

I'm glad you've found a solution. Thanks for the update.