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Using the Highlighter

In addition to the two pen widths and four pen colors, you can convert the pen to a highlighter. To select a highlighter color , tap any of the bottom four buttons on the Pens toolbar. Once you have selected a highlighter, you can drag the pen across the text or ink you want to highlight. Every time you drag the pen across the text, you can add another line of highlighting. It might take several strokes of the highlighter to highlight a single line of text, as shown in Figure 5.6.

Figure 5.6. If you're trying to highlight handwriting, it might take several strokes to completely highlight the line.

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You cannot change the width of the highlighter in OneNote. To switch back from the highlighter to a narrow or wide pen, just tap the appropriate button on the Pens toolbar.

Using the Tablet PC Input Panel with OneNote

If you don't want to write directly on the screen, you can use the Tablet PC's Input Panel with OneNote. Once you have the Input Panel displayed, your OneNote window will look similar to Figure 5.7.

Figure 5.7. The Tablet PC's Input Panel appears at the bottom of your OneNote screen.

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You can use the Input Panel in two modes, Keyboard and Writing Pad. If you use the keyboard, you can tap each individual letter on the keyboard with your pen. If you use the Writing Pad, you can write directly in the Writing Pad and have your writing converted automatically to text.

Typically, you can display the Tablet PC's Input Panel by clicking the small keyboard icon on the Windows Taskbar. If you don't see this icon, click or tap Start to open the Start menu and look for the Input Panel there.

When you create a new page in OneNote, the cursor is placed in the Page Title area of the page header. Anything you enter in the Input Panel at this point will appear in the Page Title. In order to start inputting text in OneNote using the Input Panel, first, take your pen and tap once within the OneNote page. This will move the cursor location to the note area rather than the page header. Then continue to enter text in the Tablet PC's Input Panel.

Anything you write in the Input Panel is converted to text in OneNote. You can use the Input Panel for letters , numbers , and most punctuation marks. In order to enter symbols in the Input Panel, you'll need to tap the & symbol on the Input Panel to display the symbol panel, as shown in Figure 5.8, or switch to keyboard view. Otherwise the Input Panel assumes you're entering text and will try to convert the symbol to text.

Figure 5.8. You can use the Symbol Panel to enter symbols.

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Fixing Mistakes

Even though we might like to think we're all perfect, we all make mistakes while either typing or writing. It might be that the Input Panel misinterpreted what you attempted to tap or write, or you might just need to change what you previously wrote. You can correct mistakes in several ways, but probably the easiest way to correct a mistake is with your Tablet PC's pen.

If you haven't already done so within OneNote, flip your Tablet PC's pen over and place the top of the pen (where the eraser would be if you were holding a pencil) on the Tablet's screen. Instead of the dot that appears on the screen when you use the tip of the pen, you'll see a little eraser appear on the screen. You can actually erase text or ink using this eraser.

Erasing Ink

In order to erase ink that's on the OneNote screen, you will have to press harder on the screen than you do for simply writing. You'll need to experiment with how hard you need to press to erase your ink. Every Tablet PC has a different pen. Your pen might have a small button on the top of the pen. If so, you'll probably need to press hard enough to slightly depress this button.

To erase ink, you can either drag your eraser over the ink while pressing on the screen, or press down directly on a line of ink. For example, if you have a large W on the screen, you can position your eraser on one line of the W and press down. The entire W is deleted.

tip

If you drag your eraser back and forth over a word, you can delete the entire word with just a few strokes.

You cannot delete just one short segment of the W. You can delete one pen stroke at a time. So if you're writing in cursive , you might not be able to delete just one letter of a word. You might only be able to delete the entire word or several letters at a time.

Erasing Typed Text

You can't use the pen eraser to erase typed text. You'll have to use the cursor to select the text and delete it. You can use the pen to select a block of typed or written text and then delete the selected text. We'll cover using the pen as a selection tool later in this chapter.