In the latest Office Insider Fast build for Outlook (1907 Build 11727.20034), you now get the feature to create drawings or handwritten emails in Outlook using your finger or pen. This is great if you want to give your email a more personal touch or quickly create a drawing to explain something quickly. It works with touch, Pens (like the Surface Pen) or even with a mouse or trackpad.

The Outlook team mentions a couple of scenarios for this:

  • Insert a drawing canvas and start inking in an Outlook Email.
  • Insert a picture and ink directly on it with a stylus or Surface Pen
  • Play tic-tac-toe with a colleague and ink continuously on the same drawing canvas by replying back and forth.
  • Save your ink in drafts and reopen them to continue working.
  • Copy and paste ink and drawing canvases from other apps.
  • Use multiple drawing canvases in one email and draw in all of them.

Release notes

If you are running the Office Insider Fast builds on your machine, you can find the notes in “What’s New”.

Office Insider Release Notes Drawing in Outlook

How to enable drawing and handwritten emails in Outlook

If you want to use drawing in Outlook, the Draw tab is enabled by default on touch-enabled devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro. If you are not on a touch-enabled device, you can go to Customize Ribbon and select the Draw tab, to use a mouse or trackpad.

I hope this gives you a quick look at Ink in Outlook and how you can create handwritten emails and drawings within an email.  If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment.