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From pen to Notion: send your handwritten notes to Notion

Turn a handwritten notebook into a Notion page, with its text, summary, tags and a link to the original, in two clicks.

Michal Wlosik

Michal Wlosik

· 2 min read

From pen to Notion: send your handwritten notes to Notion

If Notion is where your projects live, your handwritten notes should be there too. Penlo turns a notebook from your e-ink tablet into a Notion page: the cleaned-up text of every page, a short summary, your tags, and a link back to the original handwriting.

Connect Notion once

  1. In Penlo, open Settings › Export & destinations and choose Add destination › Notion.
  2. Sign in to Notion and pick which pages Penlo may use. Notion only lets Penlo see the pages you select here.
  3. Back in Penlo, choose the Notion page your notes should go under.
Pages or a database? By default each notebook becomes a page under the page you chose. Switch on Save as a database and Penlo creates a Penlo Notes database instead, with columns for the date, tags, page count, summary and a link to the PDF. It's handy for filtering and sorting in Notion.

Send a notebook

Open any notebook in Penlo, go to the Export tab, and under Send to choose Notion. A few seconds later the page appears in your Notion workspace.

The Export tab in Penlo with Download, Share and Send to Notion options
The Export tab: download, share, or send to Notion.

What ends up in Notion

  • The text of every page, cleaned up and including any corrections you made in Penlo.
  • The AI summary of the notebook.
  • Your tags, the page count and the date it was synced.
  • A link to the original handwritten PDF, so you can always check what you actually wrote.
About the PDF link: to make the original viewable from Notion, Penlo creates a share link for that notebook. Anyone with the link can view it, so treat it like any other shared link. You can turn sharing off for a notebook in Penlo at any time.

Updating a page

Fixed a word or added pages on your tablet? Send the notebook again and Penlo updates the same Notion page instead of creating a duplicate.

Other ways to get the text out

Notion isn't the only option on the Export tab. You can also download a notebook as Markdown, a PDF or images, copy its text, email it to yourself, or create a share link. If you'd rather have an AI assistant use your notes, connect Penlo to Claude or ChatGPT.

Which plan?

Sending to Notion is part of Pro and Power, and of the 7-day free trial every new account starts with.

Try Penlo free for 7 days
Michal Wlosik

Written by

Michal Wlosik

Builder, product marketer. Creator of Penlo and Ectobuilder. Co-author of The AdTech Book. Writes about turning handwritten notes into searchable, useful text.

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