With the world's obsession with apps and smartphones, it's easy to forget how a simple handwritten note is sometimes the easiest way to jot down your thoughts. Luckily, you can still get the benefits of a searchable, syncable database with handwritten notes and get the best of both worlds.
With the text field focused, write a word on the handwriting panel with your pen. Windows will automatically detect the word you’re writing. Tap the space button on the right side of the panel with your stylus and Windows will enter the word into the text field you have focused. Convert Handwriting to Text in OneNote: Instructions. To convert handwriting to text in OneNote, select the note to convert. Then click the “Draw” tab in the Ribbon. Then click the “Ink to Text” button in the “Convert” button group on the “Draw” tab of the Ribbon. OneNote will then convert the handwriting to typed text.
Handwriting Isn't Dead
If you need to make a note of someone's phone number, it makes perfect sense to type it directly into your phone rather than using paper as a middleman. However, if you're talking on the phone or don't have your phone around, you may grab the nearest pen-like implement and scrawl the information down on any available flat surface, the back of your hand, or whatever else is within reach. Heck, some of you even prefer pen and paper for managing their to-do list.
Advertisement
There are many advantages to writing longhand. Over the years, there have been numerous studies that suggest that it is easier to remember information if it is written out in longhand rather than typed. Students the world over are all too familiar with this concept—who hasn't spent hours writing and re-writing lecture notes when cramming for an exam?
Why You Learn More Effectively by Writing Than by Typing
The act of writing helps you clarify your thoughts, remember things better, and reach your goals…
Read more ReadAdvertisement
Opting for the more brain-intensive process of writing greatly improves the scope for data retention. Typing can be a passive process reliant on memory-muscle, while writing is more involved. The medical community, learning specialists and undergraduate studies all support the idea. Plus, your pen will not run out of battery, and a writing surface is nearly always available—even if its just the back of your hand.
Handwritten notes aren't perfect, of course. For one, they're difficult to search through—few people are willing to carry a stack of paper-based notes around with them on the off-chance they might need to refer to them! Digital notes also have the advantage of syncing between devices, so you always have them with you—no need to carry around something extra.
Advertisement
So what's a gadget-obsessed geek to do? Get the best of both worlds: convert your handwritten notes to digital when you need to store them for later. There are a lot of ways to do so.
Note Taking Styles Compared: Evernote vs Plain Text vs Pen and Paper
You have about a billion options for notes apps on your computer and your smartphone. Picking one…
Read more ReadAdvertisement
Four Ways to Capture Your Handwritten Notes
Advertisement
Your Smartphone: If you have your phone on hand, you already have a way to convert handwritten notes into a digital format. Evernote and OneNote both do this well. In Evernote, add a new note using your camera, and it'll process your handwriting to make the note searchable (though this may take awhile if you aren't a premium subscriber). OneNote's handwriting recognition is arguably better, though it takes an extra step or two: just create a note with a photo, then in the desktop app, right-click the image to make it searchable.
Seven Tips and Tricks to Get More Out of OneNote
OneNote is an awesome, powerful note-taking tool, but it's also one of those apps that only…
Read more ReadAdvertisement
A Document Scanner: You might feel that snapping photos of notes is a little fiddly, and it's certainly not ideal in every situation. A portable scanner like the Doxie Go provides a couple of ways to scan documents. The scanner is small and light enough to be slung in a bag and carried around, and has rechargeable battery. It can be used in the traditional way, connected to a computer, but the rechargeable battery and built in memory means you can also store scans on the scanner until you are able to connect to a PC or Mac.
It's not suitable for scanning books, but if you have sheets of printed or handwritten notes to scan, it's great. Doxie's OCR only converts printed documents, so if you want to make those handwritten notes searchable, you'll want to import them into something like Evernote or OneNote after scanning them.
Advertisement
How I Went Completely Paperless in Two Days
When you look at the piles of paper you've stored for years, going paperless feels daunting.…
Read more ReadA Smart Pen: Of course, you don't have to scan at all if you don't want to. Smart pens like the from LiveScribe 3 (which costs around $150) can record handwriting in digital form as you write. LiveScribe requires you to use special 'dot paper' (starting at $15 for 198 pages), but when you're done, you'll have an ink copy of your writing and a digital copy saved to the pen's memory which you can then synchronize with your computer, phone or tablet.
Advertisement
Digitizing text in this way is preferable for some people since it keeps hard copies of notes neatly organized in notebook, while also providing the added benefit of a computer-based copy. Compared to a scanner, using a pen to create an analog and digital copy at the same time is very efficient.
A Tablet and Stylus: Of course, if you have a tablet, they work just as well. Despite the name, graphic tablet and stylus combos are not solely for drawing—they handle writing equally well. Wacom is one of the most renowned names in this field with tablets at various price points (starting at $99), and the styli work with the likes of Microsoft Office and Windows 8's built-in handwriting recognition. The writing-to-text conversion is impressive, and while you may have to spend a little time training Windows to recognize your style, it's something that will pay off.
Advertisement
On a touch screen device such as the Microsoft Surface, Windows will detect that a touchscreen is present. You should see a large keyboard icon in the system tray, but if this is not visible just right click the taskbar and click Toolbars > Touch Keyboard. To get started with handwriting recognition, click the keyboard icon and then click the keyboard button to the lower right of the onscreen keyboard that appears. Click the third icon in the popup menu to switch to handwriting mode.
Use your stylus to write on screen and your handwriting will be converted to printed text as you write. There's no need to print, either, since it can also convert cursive writing.The more you use handwriting recognition, the more accurate it becomes.
Advertisement
Writing is not dead—far from it—but it has changed change massively in recent years. The act of writing is something many of us are simply out of the habit of doing. Rather than abandoning it altogether in favor of writing solely with a pen, or going to the other extreme and fully embracing paper and ink, combining the two could be way ahead.
Advertisement
Whilst most people are increasingly using smartphones or scanners to scan and send important documents. Well, it’s a good practice to store documents in a digital medium. This eliminates the chances of them getting soiled or lost. But, what about handwritten notes? We all have a ton of handwritten notes and documents stacked up. How do you turn those into digital notes?
Well typing them back is an option but frankly let’s just avoid it. So, there are apps which let you convert your handwritten text and notes into digital text using advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. So, below are few Android Apps which not only converts your Handwritten Notes to Digital documents but also let you edit them.
Android Apps to Convert Handwritten Notes to Editable Text
1. Microsoft Office Lens
One Note is a fully functional note-taking app from Microsoft. To assist it, Microsoft has another awesome app called Office Lens. It is a scanner app that will quickly take a snap of your text and turn it into digital format. The only caveat is that You will have to download One Note, to use the OCR feature of Office Lens.
You can scan notes, whiteboard, and handouts using the powerful scanner function. To do that, download and install the Office Lens app and follow the below mentioned steps.
1. Open the app and you will have the camera interface open directly. Point the camera towards the text. The app will detect the area where the handwritten text is located and scan it. You can manually center the app and adjust the focus if you want. Once you have the desired frame, tap on the shutter button to take a snap.
2. When the snap is loaded, you will be presented with the cropped text area. Now, you can edit the selection or approve it. You have a bunch of crop, edit and adjustment tools on the top of the page. To edit the pic click on the crop button at the top. Now, on the edit screen readjust the points to select only the text area. Once you have the area selected, tap on Done.
3. Click on the check button to work with the current selection and move to the next step. Alternatively, you can also click on the button adjacent to the check button to it to discard the image.
3. Once you approve the selection, you will be asked for the format you want to save the file in. You can save it in Word, PowerPoint, One Note or Save it directly as a PDF or a photo.
5. I have imported the photo in Word and that is where you will get the OCR text. OCR text works well only for whiteboard handwritten texts and won’t work for text on paper. The extracted text looks like the following.
Because Office Lens is a Microsoft product, it integrates tightly with other Microsoft products like Office 365 suite and One Drive. If you use the Microsoft Office suite, then this app should be the ideal choice. No matter how complex the text is, Office Lens just simply works without any effort. However, you will have to sign in or create an account a Microsoft account first.
Office lens comes with 4 different options: Document, Whiteboard, Business Card, and Photo. For each of this setting, the app will adjust the brightness and contrast settings to increase visibility and accuracy. Choose the above option depending on what text surface you are dealing with. Whiteboards are usually tricky because there is this glare which makes the image difficult to read and process. But since Lens has a special option just for that, it gets pretty easy.
Office Lens is a great tool to scan and store all your notes, whether they are handwritten or printed. It also makes sorting and searching much easier. Office Lens is probably the most powerful image to text scanner available on the Android platform to date.
Download Microsoft Office lens
2. Text Scanner OCR
Another high-quality Image to Text OCR scanner is Text Scanner OCR. It comes as a second choice to Microsoft Office Lens. We often see website URLs and phone numbers printed on newspapers, magazines, and visiting cards. Now, using Text Scanner OCR you can quickly call on those numbers or visit the website URLs without even typing them.
Extracting text from an image with Text Scanner OCR is fairly simple and a 2-step process. When you launch the app, it will directly open the camera. After you grant the necessary permissions, you can begin scanning notes and documents.
1. Point the camera towards the board or the handwritten note from where you want to grab the text. Like Office Lens, you can manually adjust the focus. Once the focus is set, tap on the shutter button to take a snap.
2. After you have taken the snap, the app processes the image. Post-processing, you will get the text extracted from the image on a blank white canvas. From here, you can choose to either edit the text or share it.
The app also provides some additional settings like you can set the phone to vibrate when the text is read successfully. And for some reason, you can also choose different audio sounds to play instead of vibration. Another thing that I liked is the ability to manually edit the text which is missing in Microsoft Office Lens.
Text Scanner OCR is the fastest handwriting to text converter available for free and hence it has ads. You will see banner ads after the image is processed. It can be a little annoying at times but this is how the developer earns bread and butter. If you are annoyed by the ads, then you can upgrade to the premium variant starting at 1.75$ a month.
Download Text Scanner OCR
Closing Words
Office Lens works flawlessly when it comes to scanning typed texts. On the other hand, Text Scanner OCR works really well when it comes to handwritten notes whether it’s a piece of paper or whiteboard. However, I found Office Lens to be slightly better because of the native Office 365 integration. Another plus point is the ad-free experience.
Having said that, Office Lens fails when it comes to handwritten texts on paper. Office Lens also provides different settings like the whiteboard, business cards, and documents because of its ability to adjust brightness and contrast. But, if you don’t use Office 365 and you just want a quick and easy way to convert an image to text, Text Scanner OCR works great. It just works and you don’t need OneNote or anything else. So, in the end, it really depends on your usage and purpose.
Let us know of any other alternatives that you use to convert handwritten text in the comments below.