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Erase ink with the Scratch-out gesture in OneNote on Windows

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Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! My name is Katie Sullivan and I’m a Product Manager on the Office Natural User Interface team.  I’m excited to share the latest improvement to the Pen & Ink experience in OneNote on Windows. You can now quickly draw a scribble over your ink to erase the ink behind it.

NOTE: If you missed our earlier posts about Pen & Ink improvements in OneNote on Windows, learn more about the new Draw tab and ink tools and how to quickly create neat lines and shapes when inking.

Erase ink with the Scratch-out gesture

Using your pen tool, you can scratch out your ink (letters, words, or drawings) to erase them.  This new gesture provides an even faster way to delete ink while staying in the flow!

How it works 

  • With a pen tool selected, quickly draw a scribble (loopy or zig-zaggy stroke) over the ink you want to erase and notice that the ink behind it is removed. 

Animation of the Scratch-out gesture to erase ink

NOTE: If you want to restore the ink and the scribble shape back, select Undo.

Tips and tricks

  • This gesture works best when you fully cover the content you wish to erase.  

Animation showing how to erase ink with a gesture

  • To disable the gesture, File > Options > Advanced > Pen, and then clear the  Enable the scratch-out gesture while inking check box.

Availability

The Scratch-out gesture is available to Beta Channel users running Version 2304 (Build 16322.10000) or later.

Note that these features are not available on OneNote for Windows 10.

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Please click Help > Feedback to submit your thoughts about this feature.  We’d love feedback on how the scratch out gesture worked for you while inking.