See Starting with Document Collaboration for the basics of sharing a document with yourself across multiple computers. With modern Office collaboration, any edits you make on a cloud stored document will appear very quickly on the desktop machine or other device. Most likely you’ll save the document to OneDrive because that’s easily available and integrated with Office. Whether you work on the original or a copy, save the document to cloud storage that’s available to all the devices you have. There’s no risk of accidental deletions, drawings or hand notes appearing in the final document by mistake. But our cautious preference is making a copy of the original document and draw on the copy.ĭrawing on a copy means the original is ‘safe’ and unmarked. You could make your hand drawn edits directly onto the original Word document. Get used to the pen, digital ink and options first.
If you’re new to digital ink/pen, open a blank document and play around.
HOW TO EDIT IN WORD WITHOUT PRO
The tablet is an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil.
HOW TO EDIT IN WORD WITHOUT PLUS
Selecting a digital pen is a whole ‘thing’ itself because many of the pens on sale don’t work very well or in all situations.įor this example, we’ll have a standard Windows 10/Mac computer plus a tablet with pen. You’ll need a digital pen and a tablet or laptop touch screen to use it on. All that matters is you understanding your own notes! What you need These are comments/markup for personal use. In other words, more like a paper with ink edits than the neat and tidy marketing images. We’ll use a Word document for our example but that same applies to PowerPoint or Excel. Here’s how ‘handwritten’ editing works in the real world. How handwritten document markup really works Highlighting isn’t perfectly straight and aligned with text. Handwriting doesn’t look like it came out of a typeface book. Most people can’t draw a perfectly straight line, let alone a circle. That’s not how it works in the real world. Nice straight lines, neat ovals and almost inhumanly tidy handwriting. Microsoft has been promoting the draw capabilities of Office for some years, but their examples always seem too neat and tidy. Warning: this article includes messy handwritten spaces, ragged lines and truly dreadful handwriting! The way it’s supposed to look We’ll include the important steps and precautions that Microsoft omits. As a regular traveler, printing out isn’t an option so he’s switched to reviewing documents on a tablet. In this article our head honcho, Peter Deegan, explains how he does ‘handwritten’ markup. Do some editing during your commute (bus, train etc.) or just sitting on the sofa. Use different digital ‘pens’ or ‘highlighters’. You can ‘write’ or ‘scribble’ on an electronic version of your document just like a paper version, there’s even some advantages. You can get much the same or even better experience by editing with a digital pen on a tablet or convertible laptop. Editing on paper is easier and it’s a break from the screen and typing. Later you revise the Word document based on your pen notes. Here’s a real-world guide to how you can do it, leaving aside the hype and flashy demos.Įven these days, it’s very common to print out a document and review it on paper making notes with a pen. Instead of printing them out and using a pen/pencil, do it on-screen with a digital pen. It’s possible and practical to make ‘handwritten’ notes or edits direct on your Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.