How to Reproduce Your Handwriting or Sketch in Microsoft Office

To understand something, you have to explain it again. Or show how it's done one more time. Microsoft Office 2016 has a nice little feature that allows you to reproduce a drawing, sketch, or handwritten note. In short, you can reproduce ink strokes in Microsoft Office with a touch of a button.

The Ink Replay feature is available to Office 365 users in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and the OneNote Windows 10 app (but not OneNote 2016).

How to enable ink rendering in Microsoft Office

The ink playback feature is very useful when you want to reproduce how a specific process occurred. It easily helps to communicate your idea with the help of step-by-step execution. Try it out with a math equation to see its instant value as a teaching aid.

But in case you don't see it on your ribbon, enable it to appear on the ribbon.

1. Go File> Options .
2. Select the Customize Ribbon tab in the Options dialog box.
3. Go to the Customize the ribbon column and choose Main tabs or All Tabs from the dropdown.
4. Select the checkbox to Draw tongue.
   
5. Click OK to close the dialog.

The Drawing tab is now displayed on the Ribbon with the different pens and the Ink Repeat button.

How to use Ink Replay in Microsoft Office

1. Open a document and click the Draw tab on the ribbon.
2. Select a pen and pen color, and then draw, draw, or handwrite something on the page.
   
3. Click the Ink Reproduction button to see the game illustration.

You can't control the playback speed but instead use the forward and backward playheads to move through the ink one step at a time. You can also drag the progress bar to any part of the animation that you want to play.

The ink rendering feature is designed to be used with Windows 10 touchscreen devices. But, you can apply them to non-touchscreen uses as well, though it's not as much fun.

Note: Interestingly, Microsoft OneNote 2016 does not have this feature yet. However, you can find the Ink Replay feature in the OneNote Windows 10 app (just type “One Note” in the Start menu, not “OneNote 2016”).

Ink Replay is a fantastic annotation assistant. Thank goodness, annotating is getting easier The Simple Guide to Annotating:How to Annotate PDFs, eBooks, Images, and Websites The Simple Guide to Annotating:How to Annotate PDFs, eBooks, Images, and Websites What is it about? exactly the annotation? And how should you write down what you read? Here are the best tools for common document types. Read more for all types of digital documents..