There is something about writing notes on a piece of paper. The granular feel of the paper is irreplaceable, at least to us. But writing on endless amount of paper is quite unrealistic, especially in a world where businesses have declared a war on paper waste in the name of ecological “wokeness”. So, we end up with a replacement medium, digital ink.

Digital ink is nothing new too. We have seen very early implementations in the early days of high-end handheld devices like a PDA. Most of them comes with styluses that helps you navigate the tiny interface that was Windows for PDA devices, and help you write out notes in the form of handwriting recognition.

The introduction of smartphones made the stylus quite unpopular, since you can input everything with your fingers on an iPhone. But styluses did not go out of style as Samsung has proven in their Samsung Galaxy Note series introduced in the same year the Samsung Galaxy S2 was introduced. It exploded and became one of Samsung’s biggest trademark series.

A digital pen is not a regular pen that writes on paper, but it is a good trade off when you need to quickly take notes in a meeting, jot down ideas, and even get a quick sketch going. After all, your smartphone or tablet will always be next to you or in your bag for their versatility and convenience. We say tablet and smartphones also because there hasn’t been a competing support on Windows devices that could compare to the likes of Samsung Notes or Apple’s proprietary note taking applications. This is about to change though.

Welcome to Microsoft Journal, Microsoft’s proprietary note taking digital ink tool native to Windows. Finally, Windows has a note taking tool that supports just doodles on your screen. It is the perfect tool for when you have a stylus to work with. In the case of the Microsoft Surface devices, your Surface Pen is now more functional than before.

Thing is, an app like this is not technically new. You can find similar apps that supports note taking and sharing across devices already in the market, excluding Samsung and Apple’s proprietary offerings. So, how is this a revolutionary thing?

A Garage Product Turned into Official Product

First, you want to understand what a Garage Project is. Microsoft has this in-house incubation and development program, and they call it the Garage. If you have come across our articles and podcasts that covers Red Hat’s Innovation Labs, you can liken the Garage to that. It is technically a collaboration space that was initially created for Microsoft’s employees to develop new ideas. It could be a new app, new tool, or new ways of doing things.

From Garage, employees and partners can come together to experiment with new ideas, develop the ideas into a working prototype, and work along further to bring the idea to life. At the end of it, hopefully the project gets to see the light of day in the hands of other users. Microsoft’s Journal is one such project.

For Working with Stylus and With Microsoft 365

The Journal app is made with digital inks first in mind, especially in Windows based tablets. But it also packs a very clever AI that makes the notes made in the Journal app a little more than just scribblings. Instead of turning the scribbles into typed out words, the AI recognizes everything from underlines, headlines, lists, and important marks. What that does is allow the app to organize the notes accordingly. When you need to pull them up, you can even use the same gestures to find the notes again.

At the same time, the notes can be synced directly with your Microsoft 365 calendar. It attaches to your meetings that you’ve put on the calendar so that you can pull it up again or refer to it again whenever you need a reminder on what your meeting is all about. Of course, you can access your journal anywhere you have access to your Microsoft 365.

In short, the Microsoft Journal app allows you to be completely random with your notes. You can scribble or note down things that you need or want quickly in a meeting. While you do that, the app makes sense of things for you so you can remain organized without wasting half an evening sorting out your notes into its own folders.

The Microsoft Journal app is now available for free from the Microsoft Store. It works on both Windows 11 and Windows 10 if you have not updated to Windows 11. To know more about Microsoft Journal, you can find out more on their website.