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?

Pratley: You can do things like capture notes on a page [and then] rearrange [them]. [In addition to] pages of notes, there are dividers in a notebook — sections that are essentially sets of pages — so you’re seeing all the stuff you’d normally work with. You can have folders as well [and] jump directly to any page you’re interested in. We did a browser-like navigation, so as I move around in my notes I can also go back and review things that I’ve [done] recently. If you want to refer back to something while you’re taking notes, you’ve got a whole history, just like a browser. Because these are all pages, unlike [with] a scroll bar I can jump through to the exact beginning of different ideas. Say I take my sales meeting [notes] and I want to put it at the top; I can rip it out and put it at the top and re-order my pages however I like. Everything you do is always stored on disk; you don’t have to choose to save. This is different from other applications, where it’s not stored on disk and then when you crash they try to figure out what was in memory and save it correctly. [OneNote] saves every couple seconds so you don’t lose your information. When you quit, [it] saves that automatically too.

InfoWorld: Am I right that you don’t have any kind of macro or object model capability?

Pratley: Right. In this release we wanted to get the application functionality first. We didn’t want to introduce the possibility of [security] holes and viruses. The nice thing about having no programmability is you can’t mess with it; you can’t actually get code to run if you send someone a file from OneNote. So we think it’s going to be one of the more secure applications around. That’s part of the idea: Keep it simple. The other thing was we kept looking at the way Outlook was done. They wanted to do everything, then when they shipped, people said “It’s nice that you’ve got this and that, but that area is over-designed and I don’t even need this whole section, and what were you thinking?” They had to do a lot of repair work afterwards to try to adapt to how people really worked. We [went] for the core stuff. Version 2 and 3 [will be] where we go deeper on certain areas that we see people actually [using].

InfoWorld: Did you build on XML?

Pratley: The file format is not XML, but it’s a very structured binary format that can quickly become XML. We decided not to do XML on this release because it wasn’t core to the basic note-taking. But we architected it for the ability to do XML in our next release very easily.

InfoWorld: Is OneNote’s ability to handle ink as well as text intended as a selling point for the Tablet PC?

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?

Pratley: NoteFlagging [lets] you tell OneNote “This is an interesting piece of information.” Some of them we set up for you and all of them you can customize. But they’re more than just labels; I can then say “Roll up all those [flagged items] for me,” and it goes through everything in [that] section and shows me all the different items I’ve flagged by category. I can click on these and jump around to see the other important items, so it’s a nice way to browse through things that are going to be on the exam, for example. Students in our field trial love this. We didn’t want to categorize [these flags] or be too strict on citing what they were for you. The flags are often just there to help [people] visually navigate their notes. But you could also say “I’d like a flag to be a checkable item.” [Then] you can filter that list and they become essentially my personal to-do list. A lot of people, when they take handwritten notes, they’ll put a box or a star next to to-do’s, and at the end of the day they have to go through their notes and recopy all the things with stars next to them to produce a task list. Why do that? You don’t have to do any recopying, just do this query [and] you’ve got your list.

You [also] have flexibility now to move everything to a new place and organize it. Say [there] are vital notes from a meeting that I want to share with you. It’s relatively easy to pull up the e-mail envelope and e-mail people directly. [The] body of the mail will be sent as HTML. The ink becomes pictures and the text is text. We try to make this as reusable as possible for people who are receiving mail who don’t have OneNote. If they do have OneNote, though, there’s a nice attachment which is the binary version of this page as a single file. If I double-click that attachment, I can open it back into my own [folder]. And if you go into that folder, you’d see a tab that represents each of the attachments that I’ve opened through e-mail that were OneNote attachments. So that one page of notes would show up as a single tab in your notes; it’s part of your database [and] you can get rid of it or move it to your own meeting section or wherever you’d like. It’s a nice, rich way to transfer notes rather than me retyping laboriously and sending you something without the diagrams or photocopying the paper so that you get the diagrams.

InfoWorld: So there aren’t any shared notes?

Pratley: Actually, there is. I don’t like to talk about it too much because it’s not complete, but [if] I saved the meeting section to a SharePoint server or to a file share, it’ll be a file in the file share. If you go to that share and open that file, [it gets] added to your list of tabs because it’s part of your notebook now. I can go to that tab and add a page and later, when you go to that tab, you [will] see the stuff I added. One of the guys who works on OneNote with me [has] a tab that we share through a SharePoint, and it’s like a slow-burning log of conversations that we want to have but don’t want to have a meeting about. When I put that file on a SharePoint site, we have a task pane that is also in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that lets you see the related SharePoint information directly in the application. Let’s say you have a team site with four [people] that you set up to talk about this interview. If you bring that pane up, you’ll have the four as members, plus if you’re all on IM, then you can instant message any of them because you have that set of people that’s related to this. Related documents, related hyperlinks, even little SharePoint tasks if you want to do that. Because the SharePoint server is acting like a relay. If I’m offline and you’re online and you say “I’ve done my task,” when I come back, I can see my SharePoint tasks in there and see that you’ve done your thing; that way we can do this kind of asynchronous collaboration.

InfoWorld: Groove has some of that functionality.

Pratley: What we don’t do [that Groove does] is if we both try to look at the file at the exact same time, we don’t [have] any kind of multiuser [capability]. One person wins and the other person has to wait. But we anticipated that, so the architecture of the app is all set up to [do] multiple inputs [in future versions].

InfoWorld: How does OneNote handle audio capture?

Pratley: [With] the Windows Media Recorder we [can] record the audio through a built-in microphone in the [PC or laptop]. We use a Windows Media Voice Codecs that lets you store 8MB per hour. The value of the audio notebook is beyond just being like a cassette recorder, and [saving] you [from] having to carry around a second device. As we talk, I can take notes and the text I type or the ink I write is linked to the audio by timestamps. As I enter a new keyword, each of these lines in my notes gets a timestamp that points into the audio stream. I can go back to these notes and say “Let’s hear them” and get that audio to play back. You can also do it the other way, where if you’re playing back it’ll show you what you were typing as you were recording the audio and you’re able to review that. If you want to write down more about what was said, you can do that and the audio keeps playing. If you’re in playback mode, these notes are part of your notebook but they’re not linked directly to the audio; the audio will skip after that point to [where your linked notes pick up]. You can [also] take that section of the note and move it somewhere else on the page and still have it linked to the audio.

InfoWorld: How does the QuickNote feature work?

Pratley: Let’s say you’re browsing the Web and you realize this is some good [research] stuff [you’re finding] and you want to build up your folder on Demi Moore — say you’re a big fan of Demi Moore. There’s a way to take a quick little note by clicking a shortcut. What that does is bring up QuickNote, [which] is a small version of OneNote, not a different app or anything. [If] I grab that [text] off the Web, I also grab the hyperlink to the [Web] page [where I found the information]. The nice thing is that as I go back and review [the information], these hyperlinks take me back to the page where I got it from [and] that lets me get more information. The other thing I like about QuickNotes is [if] I am browsing and somebody calls me and says “Can you give me a call later at this number?” I can, without leaving where I am, QuickNote type “My friend Paul is at 543-9024.” Later when I need to find Paul again, there [are] many ways to do that. I could go back into the QuickNotes and remember that it was the last one I took. [Or] I can jump into OneNote, which brings me back to where I last was when I was doing serious note-taking, and type “Paul” and it’ll take me to that page. Or [I can] jump into OneNote and know that all my QuickNotes are sent into [a] QuickNotes folder, which is also customizable. The idea, again, was to get it [captured first], and then you can sort through it later.