Hi,

We are trying to get the **Pen inking tools** to work in Office 2013. I understand they are for tablet use however we are running normal non-touchscreen-laptops with Windows 7 and our teachers want to use these tools in the classroom where they are connected to interactive data projectors, as their tool of choice for annotating Word files in front of the students as part of the class, as well as would like to be able to use these tools at their desktop (using a mouse) to practice and become familiar with them.

We can add the Pen tools ribbon toolbar to the Word ribbon menu no problem. It is just all greyed out.

For the life of me I CANNOT get these tools to activate. They are greyed out and it seems they are VERY intentionally locked down - because EVERYTHING I have done to try to get around it fails. I cannot understand why it is so locked down, what harm does it do to allow non-touch-screen/tablet users to use these tools if they have a use for them? Anyway, I digress.

The ONLY way I have seen this working is if we install SMART Notebook v10.8 (or around there). At that point Windows reports (under the "Computer, Properties" screen) that the computer has "pen and touch input available with 80 touchpoints. Great. EXCEPT that we are SMART Notebook software users and have upgraded to v14 and when we do that it no longer reports such but instead "No pen or pen touch input is available for this display" (i.e. SMART has changed their drivers and stuff) and the Office 2013 pens are now disabled (all greyed out). On a normal desktop with no SMART Notebook ever installed the Pen inking tools are also greyed out so it appears this is a standard Office 2013 action for non-touch/ non-tablet devices.

So I have tried getting the registry settings set for Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Tablet PC - Value: DeviceKind:00000001 and IsTabletPC: 00000002. This works and Windows 7 then reports a "touch device with one touch point" but no change with Office 2013 pen tools - they remain greyed out. I dont know what other registry settings to set here, perhaps setting to 80 touch points would work but I suspect not and gave up with that.

We need to get those tools working in Office 2013 either by unlocking the function from Office 2013 itself or by fooling it into thinking Windows 7 is attached to a tablet when it is not or whatever it needs to be fooled into believing so the Pen tools are unlocked. Surely there is some registry setting we can do for this?

Help!

As you known, "Pen inking tools" is touch screen based feature. it's not possible to use it on a non-touchscreen laptop.