Handwrite digital notes

- [Instructor] If you like handwriting notes, you can put digital ink to digital paper in a OneNote notebook. Drawing and handwriting is available in all OneNote apps, including OneNote for Microsoft 365, OneNote for Windows 10, OneNote for the web and the mobile OneNote apps. Let's check it out. I'll be working with OneNote here on my Apple iPad, along with the Apple Pencil as my stylus. To get us started, we're going to select the draw tab here at the top. So let's give that a tap, and you'll notice towards the middle of the ribbon that there's an eraser and then some pens and highlighters that you can use as far as drawing on the screen. Before we do that though, if this is the first time you're working with this, I encourage that you go to the right side of that ribbon. You'll see what looks like a squiggly line. Give that a tap that takes you into your drawing mode area where you can set the preferences. If you don't have a stylus, you can select draw with touch and use your fingertip to drag on the screen to make those notes and drawing. Now, I do have a stylus I'm going to be working with, so I'm going to tap stylus orientation, and then you can choose which one of these best matches the way that you hold the pen when you're writing. This will help for you to have more accurate notes and for the OneNote app to understand what part of your hand's going to be dragging on the screen as you take those. So to change it, you can tap that and that sets it up for you. I'm going to go back and set it to the way that I write here. There we go. Okay, next, let's go ahead and select a pen to get us started. I'm going to select the one that is to the right of the eraser here. I'm just going to tap on that. You notice that that pen is a little higher now, which means we're in that note-taking digital inking mode. You're not going to be typing or selecting anything in the menus. You're ready to hand write. I'm going to tap it once more though and show you that when you do that, it takes you in so that you can change the thickness of the ink and the color of the ink. At the very top, you will notice that there's a circle that's selected, that's the thickness, so we can tap to make it smaller or bigger. You can also use the minus sign and the plus sign to go in increments as well. Underneath this is where you can choose the color for your inking. Right now, mine is set to purple. There are several solid shades and there are also some texture types of inks like rainbow or a galaxy, volcano and ocean. And then there's some glitter ones underneath there as well. All right, let's go with the purple for now. Let's go ahead and tap outside of this area. You'll notice that when I do that, I do have a little dot that shows up there, so I can always grab the eraser up here and then just put a little stroke over that to erase that. All right, let's go back and set it back to the purple pen that we want to work with. And let's just write anywhere on the canvas, anywhere on the page of this notebook. So I'm just going to write text. And there you have it. Now, if you have worked with something like this in another OneNote app, you may be familiar with something that's called ink to text, and what it does is it automatically takes your handwritten notes and converts them to typed text. Of course, it's going to depend on how sloppy your text writing is or how neat your text writing is as far as it having accuracy to transcribe that for you, if you will, or convert it if you will. But this does not do that, but there's a new feature I'd like to show you that does do that. So let's take a look at that next. For this to work, you have to enable a feature called scribble that is part of the Apple iOS. So I'm going to go ahead and exit out of the OneNote app and go into the settings. On the left navigation, we are going to scroll until we find what is needed, which is the Apple Pencil right here. I'm already in there because I was in there working with this setting earlier. So you'll tap Apple Pencil, and then over to the right, the third choice down, so at the top, we can just see the battery level for the Apple Pencil. Then we have only draw with Apple Pencil, and then we have scribble. So I'm going to go ahead and tap that toggle switch to enable it. If you want to try this out, you can select try scribble, and this will give you a place for you to be able to try handwriting, deleting, selecting, inserting, joining. So there's several things that you can do with your text by working with the scribble feature. And this is something that's not just exclusive to the OneNote app. It works in several different apps across the Apple iPad, including some of the native apps. All right, we're going to select done for now because we do want to show you how to use this in OneNote. Let's go back to OneNote, and now I'm going to write that same word. And notice at the top that there is a pencil that is selected. It's the Apple Pencil in that pens and highlighters area that we have there. Notice, it's got a little A on it. So by enabling scribble, that is how you will find that to be able to select it here on the draw ribbon where you have your pens and pencils. If you do not see that with the A, then it means that you've not gone to settings and enabled the scribble functionality. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and write the same word. You'll notice that it's black ink and it's much smaller, and it went ahead and it converted that to typed text. It happened to place it right where my handwritten text was, but you get the idea. And of course, these are in separate containers. So if I go ahead and tap the T up here on the ribbon, I can go ahead and select that typed text container, and I would be able to move that out of the way if I needed to. Now you should be on your way to more productive handwritten notes that are synced to your cloud library and available from many devices.