I’m scratching my head over something that I’m not sure is possible or not in Excel. Maybe someone knows.
I’m thinking of a classroom/teacher-grading scenario here:
What I’d like to do is extract handwritten ink answers from a series of Tablet apps and place each answer into a column in Excel–with the columns and ink resizing as needed. For a given student, the answer to Problem #1 would be in column 1, and Problem #2 in column 2, and so on. Each row would hold the answers for a different student.
Ideally, the teacher could quickly scan up and down a column to see and compare what the different student responses are.
My guess is that a custom app would make more sense than using Excel, because you could do things like linking back to the original content from within a custom grid, syncrhonizing content, etc. But this is only a guess.
Is something like this possible with Excel?
Not sure about the Excel as a single soultion, but for this type of app I would recomennd you look at InfoPath on the Tablet.
It not only provides the ink to text conversion, but could do all the behind the scenes bits as well as networking to central point etc.
Might be worth a look and play.
Everything is possible with Excel. It has a very extensive object model, so you can write code around it to do almost anything you can think of. But for your scenario, I think a database backend make a bunch more sense. The students could use a thick or thin ink enabled client to save their answers to the database (you could even save the ink and the recognized in case a student refutes a grade) and then you could use Excel to pull the results for tabulation, analysis, and grading. The only bust that I see is that cells in Excel don’t appear to be able to contain ink. Ink in Excel (at least ink that is applied manually in Excel) appears to be in some kind of overlay layer.
Right now, ink in Excel is an overlay and even if you save it as an image, you could only place it in Excel’s “drawing” layer which floats above the cells.
You _could_ insert the ink (as an image) in a comment and put the top reco string in the cell (if that works for your scenario).
But I think custom app is the way to go.