One of the great things that sets Windows Tablet PCs apart from their tablet counterparts is how the digital pen and Windows digital ink can be used to annotate documents. Notice that I’m calling it a pen with digital ink and not a stylus with line drawings (there’s a difference). In this post, I’ll show many ways for you to easily annotate documents with the Pen using Office on the desktop, or using Metro applications. (click on the images for larger versions).
First let’s start with Word, and it’s pen-friendly ability to use digital ink in the Word document. Windows and Office have been ink-friendly for years, and Word 2013 is no exception:
You can also use your Pen with the standard Comment functions that are found in the Review tab of Word. The advantage is that you now have your comments neatly tucked away in collapsible boxes in the margins, which can be hidden/shown with the “Show Comments” button:
If you don’t like that, you could send your document to OneNote for annotations. Although it’s now no longer a standalone document, here are some of the Pro’s to doing it this way:
Lastly, the Reader app in Windows 8 (Metro) allows you to annotate with the Pen directly on most PDF documents. The advantage could be that since the Reader app is usually the default PDF viewer in Windows 8, the fact that your PDF opens and is automatically ready for your pen annotations (w/o even turning on Inking like you usually have to do in Word, or w/o Sending a document to OneNote). The downsides are
It’s worth noting that, as of Word 2013, you can also edit PDFs in Word as wells, if you’re willing to let it convert it.Of course, results may vary in terms of formatting, etc, as the dialog box clearly warns:
Again, there are plenty of 3rd-party Metro and Desktop applications that can be used for this purpose. But these are techniques you can use with software that you probably already have installed on your device. What other techniques do you use?