Transcribing workshop outputs – the PostIt App

It’s not often I get properly excited about new software. Maybe that’s a function of age. Maybe a function of a cynical outlook. But when I started up the PostIt app yesterday, I was genuinely excited about the new feature that the app (which is free) has added – handwriting transcription.

If you aren’t familiar, the PostIt app allows you to take a photo of PostIts or other similar square or rectangular paper things (I often use Artefact cards), analyse where the PostIt like things are, and then turn that into an editable representation that can also be exported to spreadsheet, presentation or Trello formats. A bit like this:

First off, here’s the output from a (suspiciously short) workshop:

I go into the PostIt app, and load that photo in. It automatically spots things that it can see that look like PostIts…

You’ll notice that it spots some, but not all of them. Just tap on the ones it hasn’t automatically spotted to assign them as PostIts…

Once you have spotted them all, it then creates the board. This is now editable – you can move the virtual PostIts about.

Tapping on one of the PostIts individually allows you to edit it, and also find out what text the app has recognised. Sometimes it’s spot on:

Sometimes it needs a bit of help…

Once you have tidied up, you can then export…

Excel looks like this:

All very useful in helping to make something distributable and editable quickly available after running workshops. And it’s free.