The best pen-friendly apps (OneNote aside) Microsoft Office
Wondering what you can do with a touch screen laptop that you can’ t with a normal machine? We put nine Windows Store apps to the test
PRICE From £60 per year You might not think of Office as an ink-friendly app, but Microsoft has added plenty of stylus functionality. You can delete text in Word with a strikethrough stroke, draw a ring around text to select it or highlight and use handwritten annotations while reviewing documents. You can also quickly draw shapes in your PowerPoint slides, work more precisely using ink and the digital ruler, or select and manipulate elements with your pen.
Maps
PRICE Preinstalled with Windows 10 Maps has much to offer anyone with a pen. You can trace a route and Maps will calculate the distance, or use the ruler with the measure distance tool. Draw a line between two points, and Maps can calculate a route and give you directions without typing anything. And, of course, you can just mark up the map so that everyone can see key locations or instructions.
Drawboard PDF
PRICE £8.39 Miss the good old days of marking comments with pen and paper? Well, Drawboard PDF will get you back to scrawling directly on the document. The intuitive dial interface makes it easy to control pen size and colour, not to mention highlight text as you would with an highlighter pen – or add notes and signatures.
Plumbago
PRICE Free Thanks to Squid, Nebo and Scrble, there are already some excellent apps to replace your paper notebook, but Plumbago – a Microsoft Garage project – scores for its elegant radial interface, its at-a-glance grid view of your pages and its superb, natural handwriting smoothing. You can switch between a range of simulated inks and papers or annotate and trace over imported images, then sync your notebooks across devices using OneDrive.
Nebo
PRICE £7.49 If you need a notebook app with a bit more power than Plumbago, choose Nebo. You can write, edit and format your notes with the pen, add diagrams and photos, and annotate to your heart’s content, but you can also convert your scrawl into searchable, editable digital text with a quick double-tap. You can sketch out diagrams then move the individual elements around, and even work with equations and other mathematical expressions. Nebo also captures structural elements such as headings and bullet points, so you can keep your notes organised or draft out documents with screen and stylus and then take them into Word.
CollaBoard
PRICE Free Designed primarily for the big-screen Surface Hub, CollaBoard also supports a range of other touch devices, and it’s a great way to present and share ideas across small teams. Think of it as a big collaborative workspace where you can pin photos, diagrams, documents, Post-it notes and a whole lot more. You can search through it all and move it around using voice and touch, but with a pen in your hand you can annotate from directly within the app, add handwritten notes and doodle all over your colleagues’ materials.
Ideament
PRICE £2.29 Ideament is a superb quick-and-dirty solution for sketching diagrams and flowcharts, enabling you to draw and link shapes freehand then add labels and other text in your own scrawl. Ideament cleverly converts between diagrams and structural outlines and can even create a new diagram or outline from a Word document. As the name suggests, it’s ideal for sketching out ideas you can expand on later.
Graphiter
PRICE Free (with in-app purchases) From Fresh Paint through to InkPaint and Bamboo Paper, Windows 10 has some fantastic tools for simulating natural media through the screen and stylus. The best, however, is surely Graphiter. Designed specifically for pen-and-paper drawing, it does a great job of simulating a range of graphite pencils on different papers, and through in-app purchases you can expand its range to cover blends, ink pens and coloured pencils. In the hands of someone with a modicum of skill it can create great-looking work.
Catchbook
PRICE Free (with in-app purchases) For more functional plans and drawings, Catchbook is the stylusfriendly app to beat. As you draw, your ink is transformed into precise lines and curves that you can then edit, drag and snap into position. What’s more, the lines will stay straight no matter how wobbly your draughtsmanship gets. You can even export your work to professional CAD and design applications.