Using Annotations are a great way to quickly write down your ideas and highlight sections of your Freeform board. Despite not being able to use the Apple Pencil or even your finger to draw on a Mac, there is a sneaky trick to making this work in Freeform! This short and easy-to-follow tutorial will get you up to speed with drawing and annotation in Freeform for Mac in no time at all.
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You might be clicking on this video and thinking “well, hang on a minute – how can I use the annotation tools on my Mac when I haven’t got a touchscreen?!”
Well this is a really cool little trick!
All you’re going to do is click onto Insert on the Menu Bar and then you’re going to go down to where it says Insert From iPhone or iPad.
Any device that’s on your same Apple ID and on the same network should show up here, and if you choose to Add a Sketch you’ll get this screen coming up on your device.
From here I can use all of the built-in drawing tools on the iPad or the iPhone (including the Apple Pencil) if I’m on the iPad.
And as soon as I’m finished and press Done it will send that drawing back into Freeform on my Mac.
A little thing to be aware of here is at the time of recording there’s a bug where when you insert that drawing it actually puts two documents on the page.
One is the drawing itself and one seems to be like metadata about the picture.
I found it safe to delete that second one and only your picture will remain and it seems to work perfectly well.
That means I can still make handwritten notes, I can still do little drawings and sketches, and I can still emphasise places that I want to visit even though I’m using my Mac for the main Freeform Board.
Okay, in the next video we’ll have a look at collaborating with other users on your Freeform Boards, so follow that link and I’ll see you there shortly.
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