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How to Easily Digitize Handwritten Notes – Guide
when your papers pile up up and your class grades are disorganized, your college grades may suffer. There is a reason why A-students are often hyperorganized. Instead of spending valuable study time looking for their class notes, they use the time to study. Scanning your handwritten notes is a great way to stay organized. Plus, you’ll have access anywhere, as all of our tips for the best note-taking apps of 2020, they have cloud storage so you can access information from your library, dorm or study lab. Computers and phones it may be more ubiquitous than ever, but many people still prefer the traditional feel of writing on paper with ink. (After all, this method has served us well for hundreds of years in human history.)
The problem is, you can’t organize and search for handwritten notes like you can files on a digital device. Or can you? Many smart devices have the ability to digitize your scribbles while you write or shortly thereafter. Some of these hardware and software packages not only save images of notebook pages in electronic format, but also convert their fonts into searchable text. Here are three of our favorite handwriting scanning systems, along with some simpler application-only solutions.
How to Digitize your handwritten notes
Enter your notes manually
The easiest, yet most difficult, approach to digitizing your handwritten notes is to manually enter them into a computer. This is probably not your idea of scanning, but for just a few pages this isn’t much of a hassle. For example, I often write ideas down on paper as they come up and depending on what the idea is (eg work, a task, home improvements, etc.), I place it in the respective file, where I keep notes on that specific topic. I do the same with phone numbers – I have a file for them, and when someone changes their number or I add someone new, its phone number goes to a phones .txt file. Entering your notes manually is primitive, but it works perfectly if you develop the habit.
Scan your notes
The good old scanner is another alternative to try. There are portable and desktop scanners, and their capabilities vary. For large volumes of notes, scanning can be very time-consuming, especially with a slow scanner. One of the advantages of digitizing your notes is that you can take advantage of OCR (Optical Character Recognition), if available, and make your notes searchable. Even if the scanner doesn’t come with OCR, once you have the scanned image of your notes, you can try your luck with a third-party OCR application.
use your smartphone
If you don’t have a scanner, you can also use your smartphone camera to take a picture of your notes. It consumes no less time than scanning and the image is distorted, which makes OCR more error-prone, but it’s still an option for preserving your handwritten notes in digital format.
Get a smart pen and/or graphics tablet
A much easier way to get digital notes is with the help of a smart pen or a graphics tablet. The downside is that you have to buy them separately, which, if you don’t have a lot of notes, isn’t feasible. Smart pens cost from $150 – $200 and more, which is a lot just for occasional note-taking.
A smart pen is used like an ordinary pen to write your notes on special dotted paper. You are still writing on paper, but the benefit is that a digital copy of the note is created simultaneously.
Use a notepad app
Once you have a digital image of your notes taken with a scanner, smartphone, standalone camera or whatever you decide, you can try an app like Evernote or OneNote to organize your notes. These apps have OCR, although recognition success depends on many factors, for example, how unique your handwriting is. If your handwriting is hard to read, don’t count on perfect searchable notes, but in other cases these apps help make your notes searchable and neatly organized in notebooks.
Once you’ve digitized your notes, there’s one more very important step to retrieve – back up on good media (don’t forget to check the media and backup for errors) and put them in the safest possible place. If you fail to store them safely, all your efforts will be wasted.
Final note
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