Microsoft sounds OneNote

IN MID-2003, AT about the same time as Office 11 is slated to ship, Microsoft will launch its OneNote application for capturing, organizing, and collaboratively sharing information. Chris Pratley, group program manager for authoring services for Microsoft Office, met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor to discuss OneNote and its features.

InfoWorld: What was the idea and impetus behind developing OneNote?

Pratley: OneNote is an application that we started thinking of almost two years ago [to] help people deal with little scraps of information and things that they get that are not full-blown documents. In doing the planning of Office 11, we reorganized around scenarios rather than around applications. Since [my group] was thinking about authoring, we were trying to think about the whole process of authoring rather than just the act of writing a document. That includes collecting raw information [and] organizing it to prepare to write some document.

InfoWorld: How will this app improve on users' ability to collect data?

Pratley: You get information from so many different sources. You get it in a meeting, you get it over the phone, you get it from e-mail, you get it from browsing the Web, you get it from other documents online, or often you get it just from sitting down and thinking. [OneNote] helps you with all those disparate types of information. We collected about 500 persons' notes -- some of them were electronic and some were paper. It was very obvious that everybody has their own system [of taking notes]. They clearly follow the flexibility of the tool they're using. The paper notes were all over the place, very two-dimensional, lots of graphics and little drawings; the electronic notes were very one-dimensional -- Word documents where someone had written a list, essentially. So we [thought] about how to give people the flexibility to capture the information they need.

Obviously, typing is a valuable thing, and the Tablet was at that time on the horizon [so] we wanted to do handwriting, [and there was] also audio capture. Those are the three main types [of capture] that we wanted in this [first] release. If you look at the app, you can click anywhere and type. That was important because people often throw [ideas] out that are not really relevant to what they're writing. For example, I might be writing [app] features and then I might think of people I need to explain this to or tasks I need to do. The idea was to give you the flexibility to capture things however you like. Another nice thing was if I'm brainstorming [about] features, I can write down all my ideas and then grab them and rearrange them on the page. I can graphically build up lists. You can't really do that in any application today because Word is so one-dimensional that you're focused on exactly formatting the appearance of your document. And PowerPoint's all about small amounts of data on each slide and it gets in the way of this free-flowing [brainstorming]. [With OneNote] if I [draw] a pie chart I can then go back to typing; I'm not interrupted by drawing a picture. Using the pen and typing [are] very natural. If you wanted to do something like this in Word or PowerPoint, you have to deal with user interfaces. Dialogues would come up and [ask] "Where do you want to put your textbooks?" or "How do you want to format this?" We try to be more like paper, in the sense that you don't think about your paper interface. You don't have to deal with dialogues.

InfoWorld: What features are there for organizing the information once it's captured?