Draw and handwrite in your notes, with a finger, a mouse or a stylus

Some things are quicker to draw than to type: the shape of a kitchen, an arrow from one box to another, a circle round the one figure that matters. Until now that meant a scrap of paper, a photo of it and a picture you couldn't change.

Now you draw in the note itself. In Notes, the drawing button in the note's toolbar opens a sheet over the whole screen. Draw with your finger on a phone, with the mouse on a computer, or with a stylus, such as an Apple Pencil on an iPad. Choose Done and the drawing goes into the note where you were writing, between your paragraphs.

Three tools, three widths, six colours

• Pen, for handwriting and fine lines.
• Marker, bolder, for shapes, walls and arrows.
• Highlighter, wide and see-through, to mark over what's already drawn.

Each one comes Fine, Medium or Thick, in black, blue, green, yellow, red or violet. That's deliberately few: enough to tell things apart, not so many that you stop to choose.

A line that behaves like ink

The pen's line is sensitive to pressure. Press lightly or move fast and it thins; slow down and press and it fills out, so your handwriting looks like your handwriting and not like a line of equal width. A mouse or a finger has no pressure, so there your speed does the same job.

On an iPad, you rest your hand on the glass while you write. As soon as the pencil touches the sheet, your palm stops drawing: from then on one finger moves the page and two zoom it, and only the pencil leaves a mark.

Two erasers

The Eraser erases only what it touches, like a real one: the end of a word, one wall of a plan, the tail of an arrow. Tap it again and it becomes the Stroke eraser, which takes away whole strokes in one touch, such as the arrow you drew in the wrong place. Undo and Redo are there for everything else.

Zoom in for the detail

Zoom up to six times with two fingers, a trackpad's pinch, or Ctrl and the mouse wheel, to write a small measurement or close a corner neatly. The lines stay sharp at any zoom, because Notes keeps them as strokes, not as pixels. The zoom shown at the top of the sheet, or Ctrl+0, takes you back to the whole page.

Open it again tomorrow

A drawing isn't flattened into a picture you can only paint over. Select it in the note and choose Edit drawing: every stroke is still there, to erase, add to or finish, stroke by stroke.

It's still a picture as well, so it goes wherever the note goes: on your phone and your computer, in an export, and on the note's public page if you turn one on.

Three ways to use it

Measuring up a kitchen. Before you order the units, sketch the walls, the window and the door with the marker, and write each measurement along its wall with the pen. Under the drawing, in plain text: the appliances you want and the shop's quote. Link the note to the refit in Projects and the plan and the sketch sit together.

The whiteboard in a meeting. Someone draws the new process on the whiteboard and everybody photographs it. Instead, draw it straight into the minutes, next to the decisions it led to, so the diagram is where people will look for it. More on that in meeting notes your AI can find.

Marking up a plan. On a site visit, with the architect's PDF attached to the note, sketch the corner that changes: highlighter over the wall that comes down, red for the new sockets, a question mark where you need an answer. Back at your desk, open the drawing and tidy it up.

Text and drawing, in one note

The drawing doesn't live in a separate app or a separate file to keep track of. It sits in the note with what you wrote, in the notebook where it belongs, and comes up when you open that note.

Open a note in Notes, choose the drawing button in the toolbar, and try the pen with a light hand and then a firm one. It's part of Cronum Work, with Tasks, Projects and Next.