Using the Office Ink Tools

The Tablet PC Input Panel is designed to convert digital ink to text and insert it into just about any document, text box, or other input area. However, if you want to add digital ink to a Word document, Excel workbook, or PowerPoint presentation, you need to close the Input Panel and work instead with Office 2003's built-in ink tools.

To get started, in any Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, select View, Toolbars, Ink Drawing and Writing (or right-click any toolbar and then click Ink Drawing and Writing).

Adding Ink to a Document

To add ink to your document, click the Drawing and Writing Pen button to use the default black felt tip pen, or drop down the arrow to display all the pens (see Figure 9.6) and then click the pen type and color you prefer.

Figure 9.6. Use the Drawing and Writing Pen button to select the pen you want to ink with.

If you're working in Word, a drawing canvas appears on your document, and you use your digital pen to "ink" text or drawings within that canvas, as shown in Figure 9.7.

Figure 9.7. In Word, you add digital ink within the displayed drawing canvas.

To gain some measure of control over Word's drawing canvas, right-click any canvas border and then click Show Drawing Canvas Toolbar to display a toolbar with the following four buttons:

Click the Fit button to contract the canvas to the dimensions of the ink within it.

Click the Expand button to increase the size of the drawing canvas.

Click the Scale Drawing button to add sizing handles to the canvas borders. When you click and drag a handle, Word increases or decreases the size of the canvas as well as the ink within it.

Click the Text Wrapping button to display a list of options that determine how text wraps with respect to the drawing canvas.

If you're working in Excel or PowerPoint, your ink appears in the document drawing layer and so sits on "top" of the worksheet or slide, as shown in Figure 9.8.

Figure 9.8. In Excel (and PowerPoint), the ink becomes part of the drawing layer.

While you're inking, you can also change the ink color and weight by using the following buttons in the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar:

Drop down the Line Color button to display a color palette and then choose the ink color you want to use.

Click the Line Style button to display a list of styles that determine the weight (thickness) of the ink.

When you're done, click Stop Inking in the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar.

Editing Ink

If you need to make changes to your ink, note that the similarity between ink and objects such as AutoShapes and pictures extends to the ways you can manipulate Ink objects. That is, you can perform the following actions on an Ink object:

• To move an Ink object, click and drag it to the new location.

Watch the Space Between Characters

With text, Office divides the Ink objects into separate words. That is, if you click any inked character, Office selects the entire word. Office determines words based on the spacing between characters. Therefore, to ensure that you always select entire words, avoid putting too much space between the characters within your words.

Recombining Words

If you end up with a word that Office has interpreted as two separate Ink objects, you can recombine them. First, select both objects by clicking the first object, holding down Ctrl, and then clicking the second object. Right-click either object and then select Grouping, Group. Office combines the two objects into a single object.

• To change the size of an Ink object, select it and then click and drag one of the sizing handles.

• To format an Ink object, right-click it and then click Format Ink. Use the Format Ink dialog box to change the ink color, weight, or other formatting options. (You can also change the object's color and weight by clicking the object and then selecting options using the and buttons in the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar.)

• To delete an Ink object, select it and press Delete.

Rather than deleting an entire Ink object, you may need to delete only a character or two, or you may need to delete stray lines that you accidentally inked. In either case, you can remove portions of an Ink object by using the Eraser tool. Here's how it works:

1.	Click in the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar.
2.	Tap the ink you want to erase. If you have several characters to erase, drag the pointer over the characters.
3.	Repeat step 2 until you have erased all the characters you no longer need.
4.	Click Stop Erasing in the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar.

Converting Ink to Text

After you add some ink, you may decide that you need some or all of the ink in text format. If so, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint enable you to convert the ink to regular text as follows:

1.	Select the ink that you want to convert.
2.	Right-click the selected ink and then click Copy Ink as Text. The program converts the ink to text and places the text on the Clipboard.
3.	Paste the text into the document where you want it stored.

Inking an Email Message

If you use Word as your Outlook email editor, you can use Word's ink drawing canvas to ship out handwritten email messages. Just start a new email message in Outlook, fill in the recipients and subject, and then click inside the message body. Display the Ink Drawing and Writing toolbar and click a pen to bring up the drawing canvas. Dash off your note and tap Send to fire off the message.

Entering Recipient and Subject with a Pen

If you're using only the tablet when you write your email, entering the recipient's address and the message subject is problematic. For the address, either tap To and use the Address Book, or use the Tablet PC Input Panel. For the subject, you can use the Input Panel, but you can also handwrite the text in the drawing canvas, select it, copy it to text (as discussed in the previous section), and then paste it into the Subject line.

If your recipient's email program supports HTML messages, he or she will see the handwritten note in the body of the message as shown in Figure 9.9. Otherwise, the handwriting comes as a GIF attachment. (If you want to avoid the HTML format or the GIF attachment, you need to convert your ink to text, as I discussed in the previous section.)

Figure 9.9. If the recipient's email program supports HTML, your handwriting appears in the body of the message.