Microsoft Office for iPad to Support Apple Pencil's Handwriting-to-Text Feature [Updated]

[Razorpit]

Typing on the virtual keyboard is a pain, IMHO. You get no tactile feedback, need to look at teh keyboard when typing, and it covers a good bit of the screen. The pencil, OTOH, is like writing on paper.

I wish I was as good with the pencil as you are apparently. As much as I would rather use the pencil I quickly find myself with something I need to go back and change and it turns in to a disaster. 😂

When you are using your pen already so it is in your hand? Say, you are drawing something, then want to make a note.

Or what if you have a PB&J in one hand and you are writing and drawing? 🙄

Maybe I am just not doing it right, but when I write far too often there’s a mistake then I just want a keyboard.

Exactly. I love the pencil for highlighting and drawing, but I quickly find myself in a state of disaster trying to write long notes with the pencil.

 

[Vjosullivan]

If you need to edit a PowerPoint immediately before a presentation you have bigger problems.

There's absolutely nothing unusual about amending a presentation immediately before delivering it. Spalling corrections, last minute figures, change of audience, etc.

 

[mikethemartian]

I would like to see something like this for mathematics equations. Such as writing an integral as you would normally do on paper and having it automatically convert to LaTeX.

 

[BatCat]

How about less time on this nonsense and some quality time on making MS Office integrated with iOS Files app?!? I have zero interest in being forced to use Office’s cloud drive and its an unbelievable pain to save things to Files.

 

[philstubbington]

Microsoft this week released a new beta version of its Office app for iPad with support for the Apple Pencil's handwriting-to-text feature Scribble. The feature allows you to insert and edit text in a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet using the Apple Pencil, with handwriting automatically converted into typed text.

After enabling the Scribble feature in Settings → Apple Pencil, the feature can be used by tapping the Scribble Pen button under the Draw tab in version 2.64 of the Office app. The feature can be tested now by members of the Office Insider program via TestFlight, and the update will likely be released on the App Store for all users in the coming weeks.

Scribble was added in iPadOS 14 for any iPad that supports the original or second-generation Apple Pencil, including any iPad Pro, the third-generation iPad Air and newer, the fifth-generation iPad mini and newer, and the sixth-generation iPad and newer.

Microsoft's unified Office app with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel gained iPad compatibility in February 2021 and is also available for the iPhone.

Article Link: Microsoft Office for iPad to Support Apple Pencil's Handwriting-to-Text Feature

Sounds useful, unfortunately the beta program is full. Hoping as a Microsoft Partner I can get access (yeah, I know - also an Apple Fanboy)

 

[Osxguy]

I know word and microshaft is the universal standard but why do people still pay $9/mo to use it. Its a bulky interface on the iPad and Mac.. Besides.. and I know its not compatible with windows Pages just works better and is my favorite kind of cost free. You can also open up pages on the iCloud web interface much like you would google docs. I would say use google docs but im the tin hat wearing crazy guy that doesn't trust google with any information much less a document I am working on.

 

[jlc1978]

I know word and microshaft is the universal standard but why do people still pay $9/mo to use it.

I know its not compatible with windows Pages just works better and is my favorite kind of cost free.

That’s why. If you need to send something to somebody, especially work related, Office is the only solution. Everything else is a PITA in that situation.

 

[SFjohn]

That’s why. If you need to send something to somebody, especially work related, Office is the only solution. Everything else is a PITA in that situation.

It’s extremely easy to import and export Word documents from Pages, I do it on a regular basis without issue.

 

[DailySlow]

Microsoft this week released a new beta version of its Office app for iPad with support for the Apple Pencil's handwriting-to-text feature Scribble. The feature allows you to insert and edit text in a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, or Excel spreadsheet using the Apple Pencil, with handwriting automatically converted into typed text.

After enabling the Scribble feature in Settings → Apple Pencil, the feature can be used by tapping the Scribble Pen button under the Draw tab in version 2.64 of the Office app. The feature can be tested now by members of the Office Insider program via TestFlight, and the update will likely be released on the App Store for all users in the coming weeks.

Scribble was added in iPadOS 14 for any iPad that supports the original or second-generation Apple Pencil, including any iPad Pro, the third-generation iPad Air and newer, the fifth-generation iPad mini and newer, and the sixth-generation iPad and newer.

Microsoft's unified Office app with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel gained iPad compatibility in February 2021 and is also available for the iPhone.

Article Link: Microsoft Office for iPad to Support Apple Pencil's Handwriting-to-Text Feature

What I want is while using the pencil to draw a shape (in notes at least) to then like triple tap and create a moveable text box wherein one cursived/scribbled in a note then inside that box text appeared, copyable, editable, and to add icing to the cake, each box autonumbered sequentialy then all the text boxes exportable to single doc in table format.

 

[DailySlow]

Cool feature, but I don’t find it particularly useful. It might come in handy if you want to just scribble a short phrase, but why would it be useful in MS Office? Is anyone going to write a whole report with his pencil when you can just type?

Actually think it might be good for lecture notes

 

[jlc1978]

It’s extremely easy to import and export Word documents from Pages, I do it on a regular basis without issue.

My experience is anytime you do anything but very basic formatting stuff gets lost in the translation. It's a lot less hassle to simply use Word. Columns, fonts, embedded spreadsheets, etc. often get lost in the translation. For example, I have a relatively simple 30 page doc with section breaks to switch from portrait to landscape. Pages munges that up into all portrait, cutting off graphics. Page breaks are weird as well, such as inserting a blank page. Pictures are no longer properly entered. The TOC lost its hyperlinks. And that's just a relatively simple document.

YMMV, and if it works for you there is no reason to switch.

 

[yellowbunny]

I know word and microshaft is the universal standard but why do people still pay $9/mo to use it. Its a bulky interface on the iPad and Mac.. Besides.. and I know its not compatible with windows Pages just works better and is my favorite kind of cost free. You can also open up pages on the iCloud web interface much like you would google docs. I would say use google docs but im the tin hat wearing crazy guy that doesn't trust google with any information much less a document I am working on.

The Office suite is terrible compared to Apple’s apps but some times we have to use them. I don’t know anyone who actually pays for it, always through employers…

 

[Baritone_Guy]

I know word and microshaft is the universal standard but why do people still pay $9/mo to use it. Its a bulky interface on the iPad and Mac.. Besides.. and I know its not compatible with windows Pages just works better and is my favorite kind of cost free. You can also open up pages on the iCloud web interface much like you would google docs. I would say use google docs but im the tin hat wearing crazy guy that doesn't trust google with any information much less a document I am working on.

Wait, $9 month for full Office, 5 family users each with 1TB of storage, advanced security and spam filtering is too much? Also, you can access via the browser just like Apple and Google.

Do you also realize that if it wasn’t for “microshaft” Apple would have ceased to exist many years ago? The lent them a bunch of money and also promised to keep Office for Mac under development because if Apple failed they didn’t want the whole monopoly problem to deal with.

To this date Office is still the number one set of apps for MacOS.

But sure, lets trash MS instead.

 

[genovelle]

I really wish Graffiti would comeout for iOS. Once you got used to it, it was one of the easiest and quickest way to enter text. Very intuitive.

I forgot about that. It was a Palm developed software that they also ported to Newton. Well they are long dead now. I forget who bought them, but they have clearly moved on if they aren’t dead too.

 

[VictorTango777]

I don't understand why some people are getting bent out of shape about Microsoft adding Scribble support in their application. They are simply following the established standard for iPadOS. From Apple's own iPad settings:

Would you prefer that Microsoft not follow the standards of the operating system that their application is running on?

Microsoft's Mac applications have a history of not following established MacOS text editing standards such as:
1. When cursor is on the first line of text, press the up arrow key to move cursor to the beginning of the line.
2. When cursor is on the last line of text, press the down arrow key to move cursor to the end of the line.
3. Click and drag mouse up to select all text from cursor position to the beginning of the first line.
4. Click and drag mouse down to select all text from cursor position to the end of the last line.

None of these work in Microsoft's Mac applications. Also, many of Microsoft's Mac applications have this annoying "select entire word when selecting text" behavior.

Most likely, this nonstandard behavior is due to Microsoft implementing their own text editing code rather than using the standard Apple libraries. Shouldn't we be glad when Microsoft finally decides to follow the standards of the operating system? Wasn't consistency across applications one of the supposed benefits of using a Mac or iPad?

 

[Razorpit]

I know word and microshaft is the universal standard but why do people still pay $9/mo to use it. Its a bulky interface on the iPad and Mac.. Besides.. and I know its not compatible with windows Pages just works better and is my favorite kind of cost free. You can also open up pages on the iCloud web interface much like you would google docs. I would say use google docs but im the tin hat wearing crazy guy that doesn't trust google with any information much less a document I am working on.

I don’t think average people do, it’s the business that buy the Office 365 subscription that allows people to install it on multiple devices. Unfortunately Numbers falls way short of what Excel can do. And with the exception of creating PDF documents, businesses aren’t going to go through the hassle of importing/exporting documents for Windows users.

 

[anthogag]

No…Microsoft is not fashionably late. Microsoft sucks.

 

[kc9hzn]

Scribble is a system feature that is supposed to be available everywhere there is text input. Apple said as much. So you can either question why Apple made Scribble available for all text input or why Microsoft applications don't work with Scribble despite Apple making it a systemwide feature.

Microsoft OneNote for iPad is crippled compared to the Mac version which is crippled compared to the Windows version. Even with Apple Pencil, OneNote for iPad still does not support handwriting recognition, unlike OneNote for Windows.

The idea of Microsoft Office using a custom text control view doesn’t actually surprise me at all. Especially Word, its demands for text editing likely requires more than the basic text editor supplies. Pages probably also has a custom editing control.

 

[kc9hzn]

I would like to see something like this for mathematics equations. Such as writing an integral as you would normally do on paper and having it automatically convert to LaTeX.

That would be great! I had a LaTeX app on my iPad years ago (looks like it was Texpad, but there are several others to choose from these days as well). I found it super useful to have a proper equation typesetting tool, since Pages doesn’t really have an equation editor at all. But having the ability to write an equation and have it turn into either LaTeX or MathML would be incredible.

 

[_Spinn_]

I'd love to see this functionality in OneNote as well, I feel like Scribble is most useful for jotting down quick notes.

How about OneNote?!?

OneNote is the one app that needs this worse then the other apps.

Yeah OneNote seems like the most obvious use for this. Hopefully it is in the works for a future update.

 

[_Spinn_]

I really wish Graffiti would comeout for iOS. Once you got used to it, it was one of the easiest and quickest way to enter text. Very intuitive.

I still miss my old Palms. Cloudpilot is a web based emulator for Palm OS 4 and earlier that works great. I have it pinned to my Home Screen so I can still run some of my favorite programs.

About

A PalmOS emulator for the web

cloudpilot-emu.github.io

PalmDB

The #1 source of Palm OS apps on the internet since 2018

palmdb.net

 

[_Spinn_]

Isn’t it part of Office?

It is a separate app.

 

[MartyvH]

Isn’t it part of Office?

The Office app for iOS is just Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

 

[VictorTango777]

Yeah OneNote seems like the most obvious use for this. Hopefully it is in the works for a future update.

OneNote for iPad currently has NO handwriting recognition of any kind:
No real time conversion like Scribble
No recognizing existing handwriting
No selecting something handwritten and copying as text
No replacing existing handwriting with the converted text

The only thing that Microsoft applications for Mac/iPad have in common with the Windows versions is the name.

 

[svish]

Good to see Scribble in Office apps.