Convert handwritten text to typed text

- [Narrator] You may prefer to take hand written notes versus typing notes. It could be that you're faster with handwriting, that you comprehend it better to memory, or you're just more creative. I'm going to show you how you can take handwritten notes using a mouse with a computer. You can also use this tool with a touch-enabled computer and a stylus, or your index finger. We'll get started by setting up the page to have ruled or grid lines to help with lining up those notes. We're going to find this on the View ribbon. Within the View ribbon, we're looking for the Page Setup group.

We're going to select Rule Lines, and here we have a gallery of different ruled lines and grid lines that we can select from. Let's go with the Standard Ruled line. Now our page has some lines to hand write our notes on. The next thing we need to is we need to switch from the View ribbon to the Draw ribbon. Within the Draw ribbon, we have a Tools group. The Tools group contains a gallery of all the pens and highlighters that you can pick from. You might already have some favorites setup if you've been using pens before. We're going to go ahead and select one of the black pens.

We're going to go with the black pen that is 1.0 millimeters. There we go. Now, the mouse cursor, the pointer you're probably familiar with has changed. We can see that it's this gray dot that's moving around on the page. This is actually indicating that we are in that handwriting mode. So, whatever we do when we left-click and drag the mouse is actually going to place those strokes of the pen on the page. Let's go ahead and write a word and then see how we can convert that. Now, I am writing with the mouse, so it might tend to be a little sloppy.

There we go, we have the word wow with an exclamation point. Now, let's try converting that with Ink to Text. It does a pretty good job at understanding what you have written and converting that. Of course, there might be some things that it doesn't get quite right. There we go, there's the word wow. You'll see that it's kind of overlapping the date right now, but we're still in that pen mode, I could still continue to hand write notes and then go back over to Ink to Text and click again if I'd like to convert those additional notes. But let's take a look at what we've just converted and see if we can move that and reposition it on the page.

Now that we've converted it from handwriting to text, it's actually in a container that we can move. But we need to first switch out of that handwriting mode, 'cause anything I click on right now, it's going to add more of those brush strokes, or pen strokes in this case, to the page. So, I can actually press the escape key to get out of this handwriting, or I can click Type on the draw ribbon, that's all the way over here to the left side of the ribbon. So, I'm going to go ahead and click type, and notice that my mouse cursor has now returned to the icon that I'm familiar with, and you'll also notice that the container that this text is in has also become active.

I can see the border of that container. So, I'm going to take my mouse over the edge of that container. When I get the four-way arrow, I'm going to left-click and drag and reposition the wow text wherever I'd like it to be on the screen. Now that you know how to convert your handwriting to typed text, how will you use it? In meetings, when you're sharing your notes with others, or just to tidy up your own notebook?