Microsoft sounds OneNote

Group Program Manager Chris Pratley talks about the upcoming app for capturing, organizing data

Pratley: We didn't want ink to be some weird special thing that didn't work the same way as your text did. All the features you would expect [to] work with text also work on ink, not just showcase features like bolding or color, but also search, for example. Our teams think this is a key advantage, because what we saw in the previous handhelds and tablets is that there was a huge focus [on] recognizing everything in text; the implication was that the information was useless unless it was in text format. Ninety-five percent or more of the things you handwrite never need to be recognized in text. Some people handwrite [notes] and all they ever want to do is go back and look at it; they don't care about reusing it or retyping. If you have handwritten a bunch of notes and want to move [them] to Word and you don't want to retype them, that's the time to use [handwriting recognition]. We wanted to delay that forced dealing with the recognition process. [OneNote provides] that flexibility of just handwriting and then the safety net of knowing that you can search it and find that later. You [can] treat your notes, which can go back many years, as your own personal Internet that you can search across.

InfoWorld: Does it force a search of the entire backlog every time?

Pratley: You can say [search] "All open notebooks" or "The current notebook." Sometimes people ask us "How do you archive things? If I have three years of stuff, I'm going to have so many tabs or pages it would just be too much." Your old research stuff is easy enough to Close File. If you want to get back to it, you can File Open it and it'll come back and rejoin your set of active sections. But search only searches the ones that are actually present. If that's still too much, you can limit that to just the one you're looking at.

InfoWorld: Can you search on disk as well?

Pratley: You can using the Windows search on disk. But if you want to treat it as part of your active notes, then you can open. The reason we did that is there's no problem with having hundreds of these [notebooks] open and buried in folders. We don't actually load them when you start OneNote, they're just sitting around. So if you do a search across all your stuff, [OneNote] will go look through them.

InfoWorld: Can you archive searches?

Pratley: You mean have a persistent search? Not in this release. There are many different ways we wanted to let you search. You [can search] by the label of the section [or] by title of the page. If I want to go by date, I can see recent notes vs. older notes. If you think about how people store paper notes, you have to pick chronological or topical. Or [within] topical you could [also] do chronological. Most people have to have one way to organize -- that's the problem with paper.

InfoWorld: Can you load Word documents into OneNote?

Pratley: We don't have an input filter for Word, but in the future, we'd like to do that. If it turns out that people really like to stick all their files in here, then we'll go to town on that next [version]. We want to see how it gets used and then go deep on those areas next time around, rather than have unused stuff sitting in the app. Rather than sticking it in and being saddled with it, we wanted to grow it more organically, based on the feedback we got.

InfoWorld: How does the flagging feature in OneNote work?