You can write down notes with the Surface Pen or by using a keyboard. In OneNote, you can start an unlimited number of notes and sort them in sections. All your notes stay synced across devices thanks to Microsoft’s cloud and there are good apps for Android and iOS too. I think the best note-taking app for Windows and especially for Surface users is Microsoft OneNote. The Best Note-Taking AppsĪlright, now let’s check out some note-taking apps. Sure, most people will probably only need it once or twice per life. Or if you’re making invitations for an event. For instance, you could write down some notes on a route you need to take. You can draw on maps and annotate them inside the app which, just like with Edge, works much better than with the standard screenshot tools. However, sometimes Windows Maps can be useful – at least for some. Usually, I prefer Google Maps like probably most do. Windows 10 ships with Microsoft’s own Maps app out of the box. So, if you don’t need to do that all the time, you might not need an additional app for that. You should also know that you can annotate PDFs that way in Edge too. That works much better in Edge than with the Windows screenshot tools because, in Edge, you can annotate the whole page and not just the initially visible area. However, Edge can be super useful if you want to annotate websites.

I’m usually using Chrome as my browser and I don’t know anybody who prefers Microsoft Edge. The Sticky Notes are useful for when you quickly need to write down some notes. It’s a very simple note-taking app and we’ll check out ones with more features later. They’re a part of Windows and you can find them using the start menu or by holding down the eraser button of the Surface Pen. To write down short and fast notes you can use the so-called Sticky Notes. If you own the Surface Pen, you can also double press the eraser button on the back. You can launch the app using the start menu or with the keyboard shortcut Windows key + Shift + S. Once you’ve done that you can add handwriting or sketches and you can even use a ruler for drawing. With the app “Snip & Sketch” you can take a screenshot of the whole screen or you can cut out a part of your screen. And you can adjust the pressure sensitivity which can be useful if you feel like you’ve got to press too soft or too hard. Inside that app, you can see how much battery your Surface Pen has left. And if you’ve got problems with yours, that’s where you can download the Surface Diagnostic Toolkit. With that one, you can see which Surface you are using. The first app that you don’t need to use daily but should know about is the Surface app. Most of them run on the Surface Pro X as well. By the way, most of these apps work with the Surface Pro 6, Pro 7 and the Surface Go.

Drawboard handwriting recognition