Word for iOS updates — Draw on an iPad, contextual commands on an iPhone

The Microsoft Word app is one of the most useful apps for attorneys looking to get work done on their iOS devices.  Since Word was first introduced two years ago, the app has received frequent updates making it even more useful.  Today I want to focus on two great features added this year — the Draw tab for the iPad, and contextual commands for the iPhone.  I’m focusing on Microsoft Word because that is the Microsoft app that I use almost every day, but these new features also work in the Excel and PowerPoint iOS apps.

Word on the iPad — the Draw tab and the Apple Pencil

In late January of 2016, Microsoft added drawing tools to the iPad version of Microsoft Word.  One way to access the drawing tools is to tap the Draw tab. 

There is an even better way to start drawing if you are using an iPad Pro (either a 12.9″ or the new 9.7″ version) and if you have an Office 365 account:  just start drawing.  Thanks to the new instant ink feature, you can just start drawing on a document using an Apple Pencil and the Word app instantly starts applying digital ink to your document and switches to the Draw tab.  So if you are reading a document and you want to make a note in the margin, just make the note with the Pencil.  The app will be ready for you.

Using the Draw tab, you can switch between a pen, a highlighter and an eraser. You can tap a plus or minus sign to make the pen or highlighter thicker or thinner.

You can change the color of the pen ink or the highlighter, either by picking one of the four default colors, or by tapping the fifth color circle which brings up a color wheel.  Spin the outer wheel to choose the basic color, then spin the inner wheel to select how light or dark the color should be.  The result is shown in the middle.

The eraser tool doesn’t work like a traditional eraser.  Instead, when the tool is enabled, any drawing that you tap just disappears.  Thus, it is fast and easy to remove drawings.

If you are not using an Apple Pencil, then you need to flip on the switch labeled Draw with Touch.  This lets you use a finger or other stylus to draw.  Then you flip off the Draw with Touch switch to use your finger to scroll up and down the page or select a specific drawing to move it around, or use the pop-up menu to cut, copy, or paste whatever you selected.  This all works best if you use an Apple Pencil because then you can just keep Draw with Touch always turned off; you draw whenever the Pencil touches the screen, and you scroll or select a drawing by using your finger.

 

One tool that ought to be better is the highlighter tool.  When you use it, it adds a yellow color (or whatever color you select) on top of text, making the text itself harder to read.  A proper highlight tool keeps the underlying text the same dark black and adds yellow around it — which is exactly the result that you get using Word’s normal highlight tool.  In the following example, compare the difference between the highlighting that I did with the Draw tool and the Apple Pencil at the start of the paragraph with the highlighting I did with Home tab and the highlighting tool at the end of the paragraph.

What makes highlighting even more curious to me is that if I view this same Word document on my PC, the highlighting that I drew with the Pencil looks correct, with the text staying dark.  It is just on the iPad and iPhone (and Mac) that the Apple Pencil highlighting doesn’t look correct.  This indicates to me that it is a problem that Microsoft could fix, and hopefully they will in a future update.

Before this update to the iPad app, if I wanted to use handwriting to annotate a Word document, I would first have to convert the file to PDF and then use a PDF editor to add the annotations.  Now, I can just add the annotations directly in Word.  If I am in a meeting and someone emails me the agenda in Word format, I can take notes during the meeting just by writing in the margins of the agenda.  If someone sends me a file to review and I don’t want to make more formal and precise edits using the Track Changes feature, I can just add my thoughts using handwriting, circling words or sections and writing handwritten notes.

If you send someone a Word file with your handwritten notes, they will be able to see all of the notes on a Mac or PC (or iOS device).  The notes themselves are like pictures on top of the document.  As a result, when that other person goes to edit the document to implement your suggested changes, they will usually not want to use the Word file that you sent them — because they will have to take the time to manually remove each drawn annotation — but instead they would likely want to go back to a clean version of the document.  Thus, handwritten edits can be less useful than edits that you make using the Track Changes feature, where the other person can just review the edits and accept or reject each redline.  But sometimes I don’t want to take the time to actually make the full edit, and instead I just want to convey an idea, and for that, handwritten edits, circling words and paragraphs, adding arrows, etc. are better than redline edits.

The Draw tab is a nice feature for lawyers or anyone else who has the need to markup a document.  The basic feature works on all iPads, but it really shines when you are using an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro.

Word on the iPhone — contextual commands

You cannot use the Draw tab on an iPhone, nor do I think that you would want to do so on that small screen, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft has forgotten about the iPhone.  Just this month, Microsoft added a new feature to the iPhone version of Word:  contextual commands.

When you edit a document in Word, just above the keyboard area, there is now a new bar that gives you quick access to the commands that you are most likely to want to use.  You can see about four options on the main portion of the bar, followed by three dots that you can tap to bring up the different tabs, followed by a keyboard icon that you can tap to make the keyboard disappear. 

Although you can only see about four icons in the main part of the contextual commands bar, there are more; you just need to swipe to the left to bring them up.  So in addition to bold, italics, underline and highlight, you can also quickly access other commands such as bullets, comments, insert table, and undo.

What you see in the contextual commands bar changes based on what you are doing.  For example, if your cursor is in a table you will also see icons to add or delete rows and columns.

Conclusion

I find both of these new features to be very useful when I am working with Word documents on my iPad or iPhone.  If you have your device configured to update apps automatically, you might not have even noticed that these new features were added.  I encourage you to try them out.  

Moreover, if you are still on the fence about whether it is time to update from an older iPad to the 9.7″ or 12.9″ iPad Pro, now you have one more reason to do so.  The Word app on the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil are a powerful combination for getting work done.

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