Sometimes the pen is mightier than the keyboard. That's the case with, which can insert an extra layer of productivity that doesn't exist on a traditional laptop or desktop computer. While Microsoft has built in several pen-friendly features into its own software for use on a Surface Book, Pro or Studio, third-party developers have also innovated with their own applications. To get the most productivity out of your Surface, tap into the power of these apps. The ideal choice is going to depend upon your use case, but you'll be a much happier and more productive Surface user if you do some exploration.
Here are some choices to get you started. Microsoft Office The Microsoft is more capable on a Surface with all of the pen input extras that have been built in. You're probably well familiar with OneNote, which Windows will fire up with one click of the Surface Pen's button. But inking extends beyond that application, as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Outlook offers a ribbon tab that lets you access a number of useful inking tools. Sometimes highlighting a portion of a document or making a handwritten note is a better way to get your point across or serve as a personal reminder about work that needs to get done.
Here we'll be taking a look at some of the best in note-taking software for the iPad. Whether you're a home user simply looking for a good text program, or someone who needs a pro-business typing. The tables below compare features of notable note-taking software. And adding or removing columns is not possible. These operations can be done by pasting the table into another program (for example, MS Word).
Credit: Microsoft Windows Ink Workspace Microsoft built in several clever tools right into the of Windows 10. The gives you three applications: Sticky Notes, Sketchpad and Screen sketch.
The notes are a handy way to quickly jot down something that you want to remember without the need to grab a physical sticky note. The sketchpad is good for those who like to draw or want a blank canvas to get creative or to scratch out a few thoughts. Screen Sketch lets you grab a screenshot, with the added ability to mark things up. Credit: Microsoft Drawboard PDF You just can't escape PDFs.
Afterall, they're one of the default methods to share large files across an organization. On the Surface, brings many options for making written notes, highlighting or putting down your signature. Additionally, the app has a easy-to-navigate interface that helps you quickly zip your way through large PDFs with multiple pages. Credit: Microsoft Plumbago The is where the company spits out some clever apps that serve as more of a freeform experiment compared to tried-and-true titles such as Office. One of the gems is, a total rethink of a note-taking application for the Surface.
It's very much a blank slate, with a organizational structure that displays all your notes in a grid so it's easy to move from one to another. The real star is the radial menu, which lets you swipe through the color palette to select just the color or pen style you want. Credit: Microsoft StaffPad The iPad has generally been the go-to tablet for a lot of creative tasks, such as music composition.
However, there's a very good alternative in. It's expensive, at $69.99, but it's designed specifically for the capabilities of the Surface Pen. Your written notation will be transformed into a typeset score.
You can then go back and edit or play what you've written to get an idea for how it will sound. Credit: Microsoft Notebook Pro If you work with a lot of PDFs and want a way to ink them, then may be a good alternative. You have a lot of color and pen options along with tools like a ruler to assist with better precision. When it comes to tweaking the settings, I recommend enabling the option to only make marks with the pen instead of your finger so you can focus on moving around the page with gestures and then making marks with the Surface Pen. While the app is free, there are in-app upgrades that will grant you additional features and kill the advertisements depending on which package you want.
Credit: Microsoft Adobe Creative Cloud suite Photo editing is another skill where having a pen can really make a difference. It gives you a more precise method for making edits or providing a more personalized experience. The is the golden pinnacle of the Adobe suite, offering PhotoShop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and other pieces of professional software for creatives. The pen utility varies from one application to another, but have found that it's a transformative method for photo editing. Credit: Adobe AutoCAD When it comes to vector design, is one of the premiere names. If you're looking for a touch-screen version that's friendly to the Surface, then check out the in the Windows Store. All the precision scaling and manipulation is made easier with the ability to pinch and zoom and make use of the Surface Pen.
Credit: Microsoft Autodesk Sketchbook This is a great app for those serious about art, drawing or illustration. The key to the interface is learning to use the pucks. There are two discs that each control a different element: color and saturation. There are numerous pens, brushes and other drawing tools along with an easy-to-use color palette that will give you almost limitless control over the mark that you put on your work. A subscription, which unlocks all the features, is $29.99 per year. Credit: Autodesk Inc. Nebo is another app that stands out due to the many clever gestures that you can use to quickly edit and format your notes.
Just scratch out a letter to delete it, or swipe up to join two sentences together. There are so many cool tips that I found myself wishing I could use them myself when writing with a physical pen and paper. The Nebo interface is pretty straightforward, with white notebook paper and the ability to stuff the contents into different notebooks. While it performs well on the Surface, it would be even more powerful if there was a mobile version that you could sync your notes up with. Credit: Microsoft Evernote While OneNote is generally the star of the note-taking show on the Surface, still has a legion of fans.
The remember-everything service, which originally arose as a mobile-friendly alternative when OneNote was stuck in the world of the desktop, still has a lot to offer for those who may not be keen to OneNote. Your Surface Pen is a good aid for highlighting passages in articles you've saved or for writing down notes during your next riveting meeting. Credit: Microsoft.
The iPad's default Notes app is a veritable handwriting and annotation program in and of itself, with iOS 11 adding text recognition search, inline scanning and annotation, and sketching or handwriting. It doesn't have some of the features that more robust note-taking apps sport — you can't sync your notes anywhere but iCloud, and there's no easy way to link various notes together — but if you need a simple starter for school or work, try out Notes before jumping onto a more comprehensive program. (It also has excellent Apple Pencil support, if you're using an iPad Pro.) Notability is the best for general note-taking. When it comes to multipurpose handwriting apps, you'd be hard-pressed not to find Notability at the top of most lists. The $9.99 note-taking app has an excellent interface full of tools for handwriting, drawing, annotating PDFs, making shapes, highlighting, moving objects around, adding audio, integrating photos and web clips, and more. You can choose from multiple colored paper styles and lined or unlined paper, share your notebooks to just about every major service and print them, along with importing notebooks from Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or a WebDAV service. Notability also offers iCloud sync support and a companion Mac app, if you'd prefer an app that works on both Mac and iOS.
As such, Notability's toolbar is more full-featured than Notes. It could be confusing at first glance, if not for the app's incredibly helpful tutorial notebook bundled on launch; it guides you through almost all of Notability's tools and features. The app also works flawlessly with the Apple Pencil — whether you're writing, sketching, or drawing shapes. It's an excellent, well-designed app if you want a little bit more power than what the default Notes app provides. $9.99 - For advanced note-taking, try GoodNotes. If Notability is the everyday sedan of handwriting app picks, the $7.99 GoodNotes app is the high-powered sports car: It's less intuitive, but stuffed full of highly-valuable pro features. I'd never heard of the app until pointed it out, and I'm so happy he did.
For starters, GoodNotes offers a truly massive selection of paper types for its digital notebooks, including lined, graph, design, and music notation; there are even advanced options that let you upload custom templates. Better still, most templates are available in specific paper sizes (if you're working for print). GoodNotes also offers a ton of different cover styles and choices, all of which can be written upon and further designed.
Like the other apps in this roundup, GoodNotes supports writing and drawing with the Apple Pencil — along with a number of third-party stylus options — using two different digital writing tools: a digital fountain or ball pen in a preset or custom color spectrum. GoodNotes also has built-in handwriting search recognition and text conversion (done via MyScript's engine, which also powers MyScript Nebo). Note: As friend-of-iMore has pointed out, apps like GoodNotes do this largely by guessing your words. You might get a hit for 'app' after writing the word, but searching for 'ape' might bring you to the same page. It's additionally a fantastic app for PDF annotation — I've used it to manage my D&D character on, and to take notes atop scripts or other work projects.
If you're looking for a more extensive option than Notability, GoodNotes is a feature-rich app well worth the download. $7.99 - For Office users, OneNote is great. Microsoft has impressed iOS enthusiasts around the globe with its commitment to great iPhone and iPad apps, and OneNote is no different. Though you need a Microsoft or Skype account to use it, an Office 365 subscription isn't required to edit documents. That said, OneNote is largely designed to be an import repository — you can share links to OneNote notebooks with the public, but there aren't the easily accessible options (like exporting to PDF or JPG) you'll find in comparable programs. It's worth noting that you can use the app's share commands to email a PDF of your OneNote notebook, but it's not a particularly user-friendly solution in the age of Apple's share sheets.
If you don't mind the lock-in to Microsoft's sync service or the inability to traditionally export documents, however, OneNote is quite a good note-taking app and general repository — you can write with the Apple Pencil or type; add photos, audio, files, PDFs, and links; transcribe mathematical equations; and even create a calendar. Free - PDF Expert is the king of PDF annotation and markup. If you're planning on doing some PDF annotation and form-filling on your iPad, you can do one or two with Apple's built-in Markup extension in iOS 11 — but for more comprehensive annotation tools, you're going to want a dedicated app to help you out. There are lots of great ones, but PDF Expert's iCloud syncing and advanced markup features make it fly to the top of my list. You can open up PDFs from iCloud or pretty much any other online service with the $9.99 PDF Expert app, fill out forms, and sign documents; you can also work with items with a digital pen, shape tool, underline, strike-thru, or highlighter option, as well as create 'stamps' for often-used wording. All of these changes, after saved, are not only fully editable in PDF Expert, but in apps like Adobe Acrobat and Preview — so you can move from Mac to PC and back again with your iPad.
PDF Expert also lets you edit the structure of PDFs themselves: You can rearrange pages, delete sections, extract parts of the PDF, and even add new blank pages to your documents. Once you're finished with a PDF document, you can even zip it (or multiple documents) with PDF Expert's built-in compressor, and password-protect crucial documents. Should you want to further tinker with your PDFs, Expert offers a $6.99 Pro upgrade in-app that allows you to physically edit the text, images, and links inside a PDF, as well as redacting information.
$9.99 - If you need handwriting recognition, get MyScript Nebo. Forget mere note-taking: If you want your scribbles converted to text, you're going to need an app that supports handwriting conversion. We've come a long way from the Newton and, but the apps available for such things are still few and far between.
Apps like Notes and GoodNotes scan your text for search purposes, but don't offer outright handwriting recognition. In contrast, there are apps like MyScript Nebo, which offers full handwriting-to-text conversion. MyScript has been a big name in handwriting recognition for years (including ), but the $5.99 Nebo app is the company's first attempt at an app designed for Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, and it's excellent. It's simple enough to use and offers a silky-smooth digital pen tool in multiple colors. In addition, users can add photographic and video content, diagrams, and equations alongside handwriting or digital text.
Nebo's notebooks can be converted a paragraph at a time or as a full notebook; those conversions are entirely non-destructive, too, so you can preserve the handwriting if the type conversion isn't perfect. You can also export notebooks as text, HTML, PDF, or Word documents. Sync is available through MyScript's proprietary service, as well as iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox. $5.99 - iFontMaker lets you make your own handwriting. Okay, so this isn't technically handwriting, but it's not quite drawing either — it's somewhere in the middle. If you've ever looked at your handwriting (or someone else's) and thought 'That would make an awesome computer font,' you're in luck. The $7.99 iFontMaker app lets you create gorgeous hand-built fonts and install them on either your iPad or on a Mac or Windows PC of your choice.
All the tools you might be used to in a desktop typography program are there, including free-hand drawing, vector curves, and support for pretty much every character available to type online — including glyphs for several Asian languages. IFontMaker doesn't officially support the Apple Pencil, but I found no hindrance toward using it with the accessory; on the contrary, even without pressure sensitivity, it's an incredible tool. If you've ever dreamed of creating your own font, give iFontMaker a try: I built my own font in a few hours. I bet you can, too. $7.99 - Other apps we tested.
For the latest version of this roundup, I looked at a number of writing and note-taking apps. Here are some that are great but didn't quite merit their own entry:., Free with in-app subscription: Like Microsoft's OneNote, Evernote is an incredible import repository for organizing a ton of data, notes, documents, and sketches. But to take full advantage of its sync capabilities, PDF annotation, and more, you need the app's $7.99/month subscription (or $5.83/month if billed annually).