How to draw on slides with an Apple Pencil
Pair an iPad to your Mac presentation and it becomes a drawing surface: what you sketch with the Apple Pencil appears on the projected slide in real time. Circle the number that matters, sketch the diagram the question asked for — without leaving the podium view.
Pair the iPad
In Present mode on the Mac, open the pen pairing panel — the iPad app connects over your local network. The connection is direct and low-latency; a heartbeat keeps it alive through the whole talk.
Draw with the Pencil
The iPad shows the current slide as your canvas. Core pen and highlighter tools are free; Pro adds brushes, a pencil texture, shape-snap (rough circles become clean ones), and per-slide layers.
Ink stays with the deck
Annotations persist into the deck file and survive every export — the PDF you send after the talk includes what you drew on stage.
Questions
- Do I need the Mac and iPad on the same network?
- Yes — pairing runs over the local network (same Wi-Fi or a hotspot). No account or cloud round-trip is involved.
- Can I erase or undo on stage?
- Yes — undo and an eraser are on the iPad toolbar, and you can clear a slide’s ink entirely.