• Illustration: OneNote's Tabbed Interface

OneNote, a new note-taking application for information workers, is the latest addition to Microsoft’s Office family of products. OneNote is designed to help office workers take, organize, share, and search for notes, including handwritten notes entered on the newly released Tablet PCs.

Announced by Bill Gates at the November Comdex trade show, the application allows users to input notes via keyboard or, in the case of Tablet PC, with an electronic pen, and features a tabbed interface that organizes multiple notebooks across the top. Users can access different electronic "pages" within a notebook by clicking on tabs at the side of each notebook and can configure the application so it opens at the point where they were last taking notes. A search function lets users quickly retrieve notes that might otherwise be lost amid the many pages of a paper notebook.

Product to Expand I-Worker Market

Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious campaign to expand the use of Office and Office-related products among "information workers"—workers who are plugged into business processes and need to work with electronic data but who, in many cases, don’t currently use the full suite of Office products. According to a survey by Microsoft Research, 91% of information workers take notes, which is more than use common Office applications such as Word and Excel. But 23% of respondents say they have trouble finding information recorded in their notes, and 36% said they would welcome a new way to organize notes.

OneNote is designed to appeal to these workers by combining the strengths of electronic documents—such as search capabilities, an unending supply of "paper," the ability to share data easily with others, and the ability to easily edit and move data around in a workspace—with the familiar metaphor of the notebook.

Microsoft believes that the application, which will probably ship at the same time as Office 11 in mid-2003, but as a separate product, will appeal to office workers who work with informal notes and memos as much as they do with formal word-processing documents, and who have trouble organizing their paper notes. This audience includes the so-called corridor warriors—managers who attend numerous meetings—who are expected to be a significant market for Microsoft’s new Tablet PC, and Microsoft believes that OneNote will complement their work with that platform. OneNote will also run on standard desktop and portable PCs.

The product is the second new addition to Microsoft’s Office family in a month: in October the company announced XDocs, an application for entering data into forms and saving it as XML documents.

More information about OneNote is available at Microsoft’s Office Web site, www.microsoft.com/office.