Replay your sketches in OneNote for Windows 10

Came across a nifty little feature when playing with OneNote in Windows 10. Replay allows you to play back notes as they are recording. It works for text which is nice… but using it for sketches is what interested me.

As yet they don’t seem to have included the ability to save the replay, which would would be a handy improvement. I recorded the steps and playback using Camtasia.

I’ve used a sketchnote I created at Leading the Product last year. My immediate impressions were:

• Wow, that looks really cool. Would be nice to be able to save sketchnotes in this way.
• Wait… the replay is not in the correct order.

The replay appears to favour the pen strokes ahead of highlight strokes and it is not in the order that I sketched it at the time. When I sketch it is usually top to bottom or left to right, with the exception of moving things around and editing.

It is possible that because the sketchnote was created in OneNote 2016 that the stroke order is ‘guessed’ in some way by OneNote for Windows 10. Further experimentation is in order.

I’m far from sold on the Windows 10 version of OneNote. I’ve been a OneNote fan-girl for years now and the Windows 10 version seems to be lacking a few things. Loryan Strant has a great summary of the issues on his blog:

• How OneNote is repeating a mistake of Microsoft Teams

And, if you think that being able to save a recording of your replay would be a nice feature, someone has already asked for it on User Voice:

• Save replay of Inking as mp4 or gif