How to Customise Your Toolbar in Keynote, Numbers and Pages
About this QuickTip
Annoyed by those new purple AI buttons that appeared in the Keynote, Numbers and Pages toolbars? You can get rid of them in seconds, and set up your toolbar exactly how you work. In this guide I'll show you how: swipe down for the menu bar, choose View, then Customise Toolbar. Drag the buttons you don't want off the bar (the AI features are still there if you need them, just not in your way), and drag on the tools you actually use every day. You can rearrange them however you like, then tap the tick. It's a small change that makes these apps feel like yours again, cleaner, faster, and set up around what you actually do. It works in most Apple apps too. If this helped, hit subscribe for more simple tips.
Transcript
The recent updates to Keynote, Numbers and Pages have added lots of new features. They've also added lots of new buttons, and in particular added purple buttons right to the toolbar at the top of the screen, which is, if you're like me, a little bit troublesome. But don't worry, because you can get rid of these buttons. And while you're there, I'll show you how you can customise your toolbars in each app to make it work really effectively and efficiently for you.
So, I'm in Keynote right now, and what I'm going to do is swipe down from the top to bring the menu bar up, and I'm going to choose View, and at the bottom, Customise Toolbar. Now, this works in most of Apple's apps and some third party apps as well, and it brings up a screen of icons like this.
At this stage, we can drag and drop icons either away from the toolbar or put new ones into the toolbar. And you best believe I'm getting rid of all the purple ones first. All of those AI features are still accessible in Keynote, I'm not deleting them, they just don't need to be right there front and centre the whole time.
Instead, I'm going to put some tools there that I do use a lot, like moving objects to the front or back layer, and locking and unlocking things. And I can simply drag and drop and even rearrange on that toolbar. When I'm finished, I'm going to press the little tick icon.
And just like that, Keynote is now personalised to exactly how I want to use it, with the tools that I need front and centre. And this works on Numbers and Pages and all sorts of other apps too. And it really is worth giving it a go to make these tools more productive for you.
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Technical details: This QuickTip was recorded on an 11″ iPad Pro (M4) running iPadOS 26.5 in July 2026.
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