Keynote + Safari Split View on iPad: A Practical Guide

You can use Keynote and Safari together in Split View on iPad by opening one app, swiping up from the bottom to open the Dock, then dragging the second app to the left or right edge of the screen until it snaps into place.

Once you try this pairing, it's hard to go back to working in a single app. Keynote is where your ideas take shape as slides; Safari is where the raw material lives — articles, images, data, reference pages. Having both on screen at the same time cuts out the constant app-switching that breaks your concentration and slows you down.

Why Keynote and Safari work well together

This isn't just a generic "two apps open at once" situation. The specific dynamic between a presentation editor and a browser is genuinely productive:

• Building slides from live research. You're drafting a slide on market trends and need to pull a chart or a statistic from a web page. With Safari open beside Keynote, you can read, screenshot, or drag an image directly into your slide without leaving your workspace.
• Fact-checking as you write. When you type a claim onto a slide, you can immediately verify it in Safari without losing your place in Keynote. No mental overhead of remembering which slide you were on when you switch back.
• Matching visual style to a source. If you're designing slides to match a client's website — colours, fonts, logo placement — keeping that site open in Safari while you work in Keynote means you're always comparing against the real thing, not a screenshot from three days ago.

How to set it up with Splicon

Opening Split View manually every time works, but it takes several steps. A smarter approach is to save the Keynote + Safari combination as a dedicated Home Screen icon so you can launch the pair in one tap.

If you haven't got it yet, Download Splicon free from the App Store.

1. Open Splicon and search for Keynote and Safari. Select them as your pair. Splicon shows you a preview of how the combined icon will look with both app icons displayed side by side.
2. Choose a split style and generate the icon. Pick the layout that matches how you prefer the apps arranged — Keynote on the left, Safari on the right, or vice versa. Save the finished icon image to your Photos library.
3. Open the Shortcuts app and create a new shortcut. Add an "Open App" action, configure it to open both apps in Split View, then tap the shortcut's icon area and choose the Splicon image you saved from Photos.
4. Add the shortcut to your Home Screen. Tap the shortcut name at the top, select "Add to Home Screen," and place it wherever makes sense. From now on, one tap opens Keynote and Safari in Split View, already arranged the way you set them up.

A few tips once you're up and running

Drag and drop is your best friend in this setup. Press and hold an image in Safari until it lifts, then drag it across into your Keynote slide. It lands as an embedded image without any copy-paste steps.

If you need more space for a complex slide, you can drag the divider bar between the two apps to give Keynote a wider portion of the screen temporarily, then slide it back when you need to read something in Safari.

For presentations that involve a lot of web content — news stories, product pages, live data — this split stays open for an entire working session without needing adjustment. Set it up once with Splicon, and the workflow is there whenever you need it.