Introduction
About half a year ago I made a post on some practical tips & tricks with “Microsoft Whiteboard“. In today’s post I’ll highlight some additional things that were not mentioned in that post.
More Microsoft Whiteboard anyone? 😉
In the last post we invited Satya to our whiteboard…
Which you can do by writing the name with your pen ;
Though I forgot to mention that you can also flip it to a keyboard… By pressing the keyboard sign.
And then you can type Satya’s name. 😉
Images!
Do know you can also import images into your whiteboard. Search for the image icon. If you do not see it in the bar, click on the “+” (plus) sign, where you can see it in the dropout menu.
Once you clicked on it, you can either do a bing search (similar flow to inviting someone), take a picture with your camera or search for a photo on your device.
So I went for my local device, and selected a screencap I made of a presentation ;
Now it appears in your whiteboard and you can tweak it a bit…
And there we have it… Inside of our whiteboard.
And now we can start drawing on it!
You might wonder in what use cases I use this? On a regular basis we do whiteboard design sessions. Here we ask organizations to provide some context from which we can start. Typically I take this information (in the form of a screencap, with consent given) and insert it into the whiteboard drawing. Where we can then start designing from… Which makes it a lot more tangible for the participants.
Bonus TIP ; Surface Book Drawing!
Did you know you can undock your screen and put it on backwards? Afterwards you can fold the book with the screen facing “outside” (or “up”). Below is a picture of my daughter showcasing how this can be done!
That being said… This is a very handy approach when doing these kind of whiteboard sessions. As otherwise your screen will “wiggle” way too much and give you an unsteady hand.
Closing Thoughts
I am an avid user of Microsoft Whiteboard! It is an awesome (and free!) tool that helps you virtually collaborate on whiteboarding. If you haven’t tried it out yet, try it out! 😉
Karim Vaes 