Windows Ink and Touchscreens

[Sheridan]

I seem to be having some issues with some newish interactive screens and Windows 11 and ink - in W10 you had the ink workspace in the taskbar and you could annotate the desktop etc, and use the draw features in Office.

 

The Ink Workspace seems to have gone, and is in the Store, but not and MS application, and even though the boards are detected as touchscreens the Draw menus (in Powerpoint for example) aren't appearing

 

Is the MS version of workspace now gone, or is it now a third party application?

[Driftingashore]

Did you get anywhere with this? Noticed it was gone today whilst playing with a new interactive board, so it’s now an unexpected addition on my todo list for next week!

[Gongalong]

Same issue here. We have a teacher that loved the windows ink workspace functionality in windows 10. This is supposed to have been replaced by the "pen menu" in Windows 11, but that doesn't seem to work at all, tested on both 22H2 and 24H2. I've tried connecting to a Promethean touchscreen, and a Star G640 drawing pad, neither seem to activate the pen functionality. I've ensure that pen menu is on via the taskbar settings. What am I missing?

[Gongalong]

We also had a teacher ask about enabling a graphics tablet on an external screen, which you normall do under control panel > tablet pc settings. The setup button there is greyed out. I've installed the drivers (for a Star G640 graphics tablet) and it has made no difference. Odd!

[flyinghaggis]

On 04/03/2025 at 15:20, Sheridan said:

I seem to be having some issues with some newish interactive screens and Windows 11 and ink - in W10 you had the ink workspace in the taskbar and you could annotate the desktop etc, and use the draw features in Office.

 

The Ink Workspace seems to have gone, and is in the Store, but not and MS application, and even though the boards are detected as touchscreens the Draw menus (in Powerpoint for example) aren't appearing

 

Is the MS version of workspace now gone, or is it now a third party application?

 

Several of our staff have reported the same issue. The "Ink Workspace" functionality seems to have vanished presumably in a Windows update. Worse still the Windows Store app needs a Microsoft login so our staff can no longer use it 

 

Does anyone know if it's been replaced in Windows 10 by anything ? Or Windows 11 have similar functionality/features integrated hence the removal of it from Windows 10?

Edited October 9, 2025 by flyinghaggis

[Gongalong]

It suddenly started working for me, but only when I used the technique to create an ms-penworkspace:/// shortcut. That shortcut wasn't working to begin with, so something changed, presumably a windows update. But now it's not working again. I still can't access the control panel settings to change which screen responds to the tablet.

[Gongalong]

My guess is that MS have ditched it because the latest version of snipping tool has the same functionality. More here https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/11/windows-11s-win-shift-s-now-lets-you-annotate-on-screen-rolling-out-to-everyone/

[Sheridan]

22 minutes ago, Gongalong said:

My guess is that MS have ditched it because the latest version of snipping tool has the same functionality. More here https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/11/windows-11s-win-shift-s-now-lets-you-annotate-on-screen-rolling-out-to-everyone/

That's basically what we've done - just pushed people to use the snipping tool directly