Improved inking experience within slides
Inking in PowerPoint is an incredibly important tool for capturing feedback and marking up slides (way more effective than a laser pointer). Ink is a very important way to engage with an audience. However, the in-slide ink experience is very poor generally and needs improvements such as:
Effective palm rejection - accidental touch pen artifacts and unexpected slide advances are common when presenting with touch and pen.
More Colors: In PowerPoint 2007 you could select from a large set of colors in the pen palette while presenting. The current limited set appeared in PP2010 and has not changed since.
Changing the line thickness :- this would be so useful for presenting!
Ink Beautify - As per Microsoft Whiteboard.
Shape recognition in slide.
So overall, inking during a PowerPoint Presentation is one of the keys to ending "Death by PowerPoint," but the feature is almost unchanged since it was nerfed in PowerPoint 2010. This needs urgent attention, in addition to marketing and training for people!

60 comments
-
Anonymous commented
Yes please, improve the inking features, specially the pen thickness!!!!! It's way too thin to be used in e-learning to annotate the slide sduring the explanation. Also ink beauty will be appreciatted.
-
Md. Zinnat Ali Biswas commented
How to create amuzing slides
-
Yomna commented
I need this especially the line thickness. When teaching online, the line is too think for students! I would like to be updated on the progress of this feature.
-
Anonymous commented
When will this feature become available for normal Office 365 subscribers (who are not office insiders)?
-
Anonymous commented
I love the Ink Editor feature in Word however I mostly use powerpoint because that's the format my school provides lecture notes in. I'd love to have Ink Editor because it is more convenient to use powerpoint to take notes and study than it is to use OneNote! If I could combine the best features of OneNote, Word and Powerpoint, I would!
-
René commented
I'm an office insider and I just found the "ink replay" and "ink rewind" animations in Version 1911 (Build 12215.20006).
I love it! thank you for getting it out there.
-
Konrad Schroth commented
do powerpoint designers ever actually use powerpoint???
-
Steven Wallace commented
Why is it that drawing ink objects not automatically associated with the animation "replay" option? "Replay" doesn't do anything other than make the object appear at once? This could have been a very helpful tool.
-
Anonymous commented
Solution from Joseph O is limited. The solution that really mimics the intended behaviour without leaving powerpoint is: Insert >Screen Recording>select the area of your scribe> select pointer off>start recording>draw>Ink replay> stop recording>trim your video at will mainly the begining and end of the video capture. DONE!! Still is a petty and not understandable why MSFT doesn't embed this simple solution!
-
Jay McKibbins commented
While I do like the Ink Replay as an animation idea, it doesn't actually show the inking being written or drawn in presentation mode. It needs to do that to be useful. Also, speed control.
-
Joseph O commented
Here's the solution within MS powerpoint…
After you perform the INKING.... Go to Animation and first ADD "Wipe" as entrance effect. Then go to Effect Option and click on which direction you want the INK to flow. Viola...that's your inking effect that works like Ink replay. You can also adjust timing and speed of the ink in the option.
-
WMA commented
incredulous that this feature is not available in replay mode
-
Jeffery Chapman commented
Hey MS, just in case you haven't read what everyone is saying since Oct 2016... Let me save an ink-replay as an animation and use it in my slideshow. If I can only replay what I just did, then everyone with me just saw me do it, and I don't need to replay it! If I save the slide with the ink on it already, then it is sitting there already completely drawn, making the replay basically pointless.
-
Paul commented
totally agree with all these comments.. I have just wasted 20 minutes of my life trying to get ink replay into a PPT presentation... which apparently can't be done... what a waster of a functionality...
-
Romain B. commented
This would be fuckin awesome to be possible just as Apple already do it ...
-
Andrew Exley commented
Doesn't make sense having it in the "design" mode. Why wouldn't it be part of the presentation?
-
Anonymous commented
I can replay the ink in the slideshow editor mode, but I can't make this an actual animation in my presentation, which would look really good, so what is the point in being able to do it in the editing mode? This is a huge missed opportunity. Presentations are the whole point of PowerPoint. Does nobody think about what they're doing when they make this stuff?
-
Paulo commented
MICROSOFT... the worlds richest desktop software company... DRAGGING IT HEELS ... AGAIN.FFS! Get this done Lazy @#&%$
-
Greg commented
Agreed - this should be a feature. As it is, there are a couple of workarounds that I've used to get this effect but it is time consuming just to bridge the gap between "almost good enough" and "excellent" feature usage of ink replay.
-
Andy Brandt commented
Come on! This is so obvious it pains. Don't you have a Product Owner?