Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog : TabletPC

OneNote and Origami

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 11:03:00 GMT

Update: if you use OneNote 2003 with an Origami (Ultra-Mobile PC) device, you should get this hotfix which takes care of an incompatibility between the two (only get it is you find that ink strokes disappear after you write them). This hotfix does not apply to normal Tablet PCs - only the UMPCs that let you use your finger in addition to the stylus.

You may have heard some of the buzz about the Origami project - an ultra-mobile PC initiative that Microsoft is spearheading. You can learn more about it here. In summary it is a lightweight (<2lb) kind of Tablet PC with a touch screen which you can use with your fingernail or any pointed object. It has a 7" screen and no keyboard (although one can be attached).

I've had a bunch of questions about OneNote and whether it will ship on Origami devices. Bear in mind of course that Microsoft does not actually make these PCs. As with the tablet PC and other PCs, other companies make them so they decide what specific hardware and software go into the actual units. Microsoft just does a "reference" design to show what is possible and what we think would work well with the software.

That said, I expect to see OneNote 2003 (later 2007) on most of these devices because it is an ideal application for this form factor. You'll be able to take OneNote places you wouldn't bring your laptop, and record audio, take ink notes, draw diagrams, flag items to categorize them or for follow up and so on. With these devices you'll most likely be browsing, doing email, listening to music, and capturing notes.

OneNote 2007 has a new mode we currently call "minimal UI mode" (insert sexy name here). It's designed to cut out distractions for when you really just want to take notes. Those of you with tablet PCs also know that the more screen space that can be devoted to ink the better since you tend to write much larger than you type. OneNote 2003 also has a minimal UI mode, but it is only available when the OneNote window is very narrow (<300px or so) because it was designed for quickly jotting a one to two-line note or dragging something into it from the web. In OneNote 2007 this mode is available at all window sizes, even maximized. It hides the navigation UI (page, section and notebook tabs), as well as any extraneous toolbars or task panes and leaves you with just the set of commands you need to take notes on a page.

The Origami devices will have a 800x480px screen res minimum, but there has been talk of running them at 1024x600 or 1024x768 in software and using smart downsampling to 800x480 so that you seem to have more screen dots than are actually available. Either way, OneNote's new minimal UI mode is going to make the most of the dots you have. Here's a screen shot of OneNote 2007 at 800x480 in minimal UI mode.

OneNote 2007 and the Tablet PC

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 10:20:00 GMT

I promised some time ago to write about the Tablet experience in OneNote 12 (2007) and how it has changed. This is a tricky topic to cover since there are still a lot of people out there who think OneNote is only or primarily meant to be used on Tablets. I still feel I have to make the point that OneNote was designed for all PCs and also to take advantage of tablets when used on a Tablet.

FWIW, the % of OneNote users with a Tablet has been steadily climbing even as the overall size of the OneNote user base grows steadily - up from ~5% in the first few months after OneNote 2003 launch (winter '03-'04) to almost 15% now. We also know that a significant majority of Tablet users own a copy of OneNote - so our "attach" to that platform is very strong. Another way to say it is that although we sell a significant majority of OneNote "units" to the 98% of people buying non-Tablets, every time a Tablet PC ships it nearly always results in a OneNote sale.

If those numbers totally confused you, suffice it to say that we like the Tablet and want to continue to be the must-have Tablet app, even though most of our users do not have a Tablet and are getting a lot of value out of OneNote regardless.

Ok, point made, let’s move on.

Ink on the clipboard
There have been rumours and theories that OneNote has a separate ink system from the Tablet PC. This is not true of course - we use the tablet engine for capturing ink and the tablet format for storing it, and the tablet engine for recognizing handwriting to text. One of the things fuelling that rumour was that in OneNote 2003 we did not implement the new clipboard format for ink (called "CF_ISF" for "Clipboard Format - Ink Storage Format"). So when pasting ink from another application to OneNote, OneNote would pick up the HTML version of that output which meant ink was presented as a picture. So even though both apps stored the ink in the same format, the clipboard did not work as a method for transferring the ink.

In case you’re not familiar with how the clipboard works, when you "copy" something, the application you are copying from registers with the Windows clipboard manager what formats it can provide the data in. When you paste in another application, the receiving application asks the clipboard for the data in its preferred format. If that is not available, it goes down the list until it finds one that is available. The other options the application can accept are listed in Paste Special, if the receiving app has implemented that feature. Just to make things tricky, depending on the application and what you copy, the data is not actually put on the clipboard when you copy since that might be slow. Instead it is generated from the original app when you paste, which is why when closing an application you sometimes see a message of the form "You placed a lot of information on the clipboard. Do you want to make it available to other applications?". The application knows you think you copied some stuff to the clipboard and doesn’t want you to be surprised when you later go to paste and it hasn’t actually done the copy.

Ok, I mention all this to say that of the many clipboard formats (such as HTML, RTF, picture, plain text, Unicode text, etc.) there was a new one added by the tablet team just for ink. OneNote 12 now supports that format so if you copy ink out of an application such as Journal, it will now paste as ink into OneNote and vice versa. Yay! Bear in mind though that the Ink clipboard format only supports ink, so if you copy text and ink from an app and go to paste that, you’re going to have to choose between HTML and ISF when you paste. HTML gets you the text plus ink as images (not ink), while ink gets you just the ink but no text. See, it IS hard. Of course these limitations don’t apply when you copy and paste within a single application (such as from one OneNote page to another) because as often as not that does not use the clipboard. Ok, not going there. Next topic.

Lasso!
One of the standard tools for using ink that has caught hold since the Tablet launched is the lasso selection tool. OneNote 12 has the lasso, so you can make crazy selections by dragging the pen around all sorts of awkwardly arranged bits of stuff on the page. Yay!

Writing Tools Toolbar is now on by default on the Tablet PC.
In the past you had to turn this toolbar on, so quite a few people didn’t figure out that OneNote has more ink-related tools than just the ones on the Standard Toolbar.

No UI exposed while inking (i.e. a paper-like experience).
We now suppress any kind of widgets showing up as you write on the page. So you don’t have to worry about accidentally selecting something and moving it or other bad experiences. On the down side, you now have to explicitly go into selection mode to move things. A net positive we think.

Ink color and thickness controls right on the toolbar.
There are now controls that affect color and thickness of the current pen right on the toolbar. These change what your current pen does temporarily, but not the "definition" of the pen, so that when you go back to that pen later it will still remember it was your big fat purple pen. :-). Of course you can still customize pens permanently. This is a big time saver for people who like to have a lot of colors and thicknesses - more than you can have in the custom pens. No need to make different custom pens that differ only in color.

Automatically extends the page as you need more room.
As you get near the bottom of a page, space is automatically added (off screen) so that you can easily use the scroll bar to move down a half page at a time. Of course OneNote 2003 SP1 added that little "more space" button below the scrollbar arrow but some people either didn’t see it or preferred to use the scroll bar to see the extra room.

"Add more space" tool behaves more predictably.
The tool that adds more space now acts more as you would expect thanks to the improved parsing (see below), not leaving behind little chunks of ink strokes here and there. We've also made a change to assume that you probably want to move everything on the page down more often than you want to add space to clusters of ink separately, so that will also work better. A lot of people are interested in the scenario where you write on top of existing text or images (usually of scanned or printed docs). This is a hard problem since there is no great way to figure out that the ink you wrote is actually attached (in your mind) to the thing underneath it. But we generally now assume that anything underneath gets moved along with the ink.

And perhaps the biggest one - new ink parser.
One of the main things people who use OneNote 2003 (especially the original release before we tuned things up in SP1) complain about are "the boxes". It's worth a little background here to make sure it is clear the extent to which things are going to get better. First, take a look at an article I wrote on this topic two years ago. Now we have had the time to really take apart ink in OneNote and try to do it the way we want. Alas we didn't have infinite development budget to do all the polish we wanted but we are getting the top priority items.

The old ink parser (like the new one!) was a gift from some folks in MS Research Beijing, who had provided the first ink parser to the Tablet PC platform team as well. We had high aspirations for determining structure (as well as identifying which ink strokes were handwriting and which were drawings). That MSR team really came through for us which is why we have any such parsing at all in OneNote 2003.

But the main problem we suffered from was that the design we had agreed on simply didn’t work well. Because of our focus on providing handwriting guides to the user (described in that prior post I linked to), we laid a requirement on the parsing engine that it determine what the user was doing as quickly as possible, and that decision was irreversible. For example, if the user started to write the words "And then" on the page, our requirement of the parser was that it figure out that the ink strokes formed words (not drawings) within the first couple of words so that we could then put the writing guides on the screen to show the user that if they wrote more to the right that ink would be considered part of that sentence, and if they wrote more below it would be considered a different paragraph. If we determined that they were nearing the end of a line we would show them that writing on the next line would continue this paragraph. So the parser had only a few strokes of ink with which to make its decision, and it had to stick with that decision forever since we committed the ink to either handwriting or drawing storage and subsequent user experience.

Could I write prose more dense than this? I will try…

For OneNote 12 we decided to reconsider our whole approach. We still need to know what the user has written since although we do not show any UI to the user as they write (see "No UI exposed while inking" above), we still have to make the ink searchable, have to convert the correct strokes to text if the user converts the page from ink to text, and have to do the right things as the user moves stuff around on the page. Since we do not need to show UI while the user is inking we are now free to parse and reparse as needed to figure out what the user is writing. If the user writes more ink and the parser decides that in fact these small rectangles and circles written so far are really a drawing and not the beginning of a sentence, we can cancel the background text recognition process. Whenever you stop to take a break, OneNote tries to make sense of what you've done and in some cases changes its mind about what is on the page. Since it has all the ink available to make its decision, it can do a much more accurate parse of the page than the old parser which had to make a decision after four or five strokes.

Another thing the new parser does for us is figure out slanted handwriting. When you write on an angle, the old parser had to assume it was some kind of drawing, but the new parser can figure out that it is just slanted handwriting and then make it searchable, etc.

I should take a moment to explain just how hard ink parsing is. As a human, when you look at ink on a page you are able to quickly sort out what is a drawing and what is handwriting, what strokes belong with other strokes, and so on. If someone's handwriting is terrible you may not be able to read it, but nearly all the time you can at least figure out that it is handwriting and not a drawing, and where the lines of text go. One big advantage you have over the computer is that you can look at the whole screen and parallel process everything you see to generate a sense of what is going on. To simulate the computer's task, imagine sitting in a little room with a slot where a person on the other side hands you a sticky note with an ink stroke on it, plus a notation about where the corner of the sticky note should go on a larger piece of paper. You get a new sticky note for each stroke of the pen, and you are never allowed to put the sticky notes together on a sheet of paper to look at them as a whole. The room is pitch black with no light. Oh, and you’re dumber than a caterpillar.

Wrap up
So what does all this mean? It means that in OneNote 12 you just write your ink and that's it. We don’t try to clump it into boxes or anything. You are free to move it around the screen in pieces. Everything will work as well as it can. Although OneNote is always trying to figure out what you have done it doesn’t make you deal with this - it just provides the results of the parse to the features that need it, such as ink search.

If you have Beta 1 of OneNote 12 then you know that all this isn't quite working as well as I describe. Beta 1 of OneNote is using the ink parser in the Vista beta, and bugs in that notwithstanding we hadn’t actually done any tuning for Beta 1 plus we have our own bugs. Next beta will be closer to the final behaviour, using the near final parser for Vista too.

In case you were expecting me to write about Drawing Tools in this post, rest assured I will write about those later. I wanted to separate them since although they use ink they apply to non-Tablets at least as much as Tablet.

Oh and Jensen posted yesterday asking people what their favorite software is and it is gratifying to see OneNote mentioned by several people. Thanks!

OneNote and Journal

Chris_Pratley — Sun, 01 Feb 2004 01:30:00 GMT

Those of you who have a TabletPC are probably familiar with the built-in note-taking application called Journal. You're probably also confused as to how Microsoft could release two programs (OneNote and Journal), that seem to behave so differently, and don't even interoperate well. The answer to that is everyone else who does not have a TabletPC. Let me explain.

First, if you do not own a TabletPC, you are in the great majority, and you probably don't have many serious complaints about the way ink is supported in OneNote - that's because you don’t have a good way to generate the ink in the first place (yes, you can use an external digitizing tablet, or a mouse or trackball, but these are clearly inferior to just being able to write on the screen where the ink appears, as you would with paper or a TabletPC). The point is that you see OneNote as a great place to type and collect text and images by drag/drop or copy/paste. You can even record audio synced to your typing, manage to-dos and important items with note flags, etc. In short, almost all the features of OneNote work great on a laptop or desktop.

Now if you do own a TabletPC, and have used Journal, to you it seems the most natural thing in the world that another product from Microsoft that claims to do note-taking and support the TabletPC should be a seamless extension of the built-in Journal application. Clear as day.

So why isn't it? The answer is partly in what I wrote below about The Myth: if you think OneNote is only for the TabletPC, then you're right it is madness to make it different. But it is not only for the TabletPC. Of course we wanted to make the handwriting experience ideal, but as I mentioned in Handwriting and Humility, we didn't get as close as we wanted to. But these don't seem like good explanations - they’re more like excuses, right?

Well, here's what happened (from my perspective and recollection of course). The TabletPC team was formed from one of several groups in Microsoft that I'll call think-tanks. They are collections of people (smart and good-looking of course) who don’t build products. They play with ideas, prototyping them and trying to see what would truly be innovative and useful by playing with actual code and devices, not just thought experiments. As you probably know or can understand, when you actually handle and use a thing, you get many more ideas than you do just by trying to imagine it existing. These are the people who had digital movie servers in their living rooms in 1994, and used interactive television in 1995. Of course pen computing had been around a long time. But the team that became the Tablet team wanted to take a fresh approach and think about the problem end to end from a customer point of view.

BillG is a big fan of Tablets since he believes in the natural pen interface for activities like annotating web pages, reviewing documents, note taking, gesturing, etc. Thanks in part to his interest a product team was formed to turn the Tablet into reality. Some of the principals from the think tank remained attached, and the rest of the team was built up of people from around the company who had experience building and shipping products (several from Office). They got the religion, and worked really hard to build hardware prototypes and software that would make the Tablet into a great product. They used the hardware prototypes to convince OEMs (computer hardware companies) that the hardware was feasible and interesting. Ironically, some of the early designs from the OEMs themselves were just clones of the prototypes that the Tablet team gave them. The dirty not-so-secret of the computer world is that no one makes much money in hardware, so with razor-thin margins they save money by not doing research beyond that they need to integrate new chips and hardware, which is usually only incrementally better than last year's hardware, because their suppliers have the same problem. In fact, most computer companies do no research whatsoever and just assemble parts or pay other companies to assemble the parts and they just sell the completed units. So companies like Microsoft and Intel increasingly do research for them and pass it on to make the whole ecosystem move forward (USB, Tablet, optical mice, etc are all ideas from Microsoft or Intel)

The Tablet software team was made of two parts. The founding group was from the think tank, and they were focused on handwritten notes as the killer app for the tablet. They already had prototypes of what came to be known as Journal. Separately, there was a pre-existing handwriting technology team in Microsoft that had done work for the PocketPC and other products. They were the "platform" team. These were joined together with the hardware guys to make the Tablet group.

Journal came to define the Tablet to many in the Tablet team. They knew they needed to have some killer app on the Tablet from day one, and Journal was going to be it (and it was). But in making Journal, the Tablet team had no interest in building an application that was also good at handling text and keyboards - this was a Tablet app after all, and in order to be the best it could on the Tablet, they had to focus on ink and pen scenarios.

When we started OneNote, the Journal application was up and running in crude form. As I mentioned earlier, OneNote was an Office product, in a different group from the Tablet. Accordingly, we had different priorities - we wanted to be broadly useful to as many people as we could because we wanted to get revenue. That meant supporting text and keyboards, since the Tablet had not even shipped yet and would have very small share when we launched, although we all suspected at least the ability to write on the screen would become a ubiquitous laptop feature eventually. And ink would never replace keyboard - the pen is useful for some things (quiet, unobtrusive, natural), and the keyboard was better for others (fast, compact, accurate input). Of course the Tablet was a key factor for us - we wanted to make sure we made a great application for all PCs, and since the Tablet (with a keyboard) was a superset of other PCs, we would be most powerful on the Tablet, and ideally a “no-brainer” purchase for Tablet owners.

Now here's the rub. How do you design something that is great at both text and ink without compromising either? Optimizing for text was well understood. Optimizing for ink was what Journal was trying to do. But both? That was our struggle. We began with the idea that we didn’t want to have two user interface "modes" - one for text and one for ink. If we did, it might as well be two different applications. All the features of text and ink should work the same way for things that could be made the same, so you didn’t have to learn two different user experiences. With either ink or text you could start entering information anywhere. You could grab things and move them around freeform. You could even do ink outlines and rearrange the parts, collapse hierarchical trees, apply bullets and numbering, etc.

I described below where we got a little off track with ink by focusing too much on structure and outlining and had to scramble to fix it, but we are very happy with how the text support turned out.

So where was Journal in all this? Well, we couldn't simply extend the Journal interface model, since it was quite text-unfriendly. And using Journal produced files that had no structure - just ink on a page. How could we import those meaningfully into OneNote, which had a defined page structure? Well, it turns out we could try, but the result would not be pretty, and like many other useful things it fell by the wayside as we prioritized. After all, there were hundreds of millions of laptop and desktop users, and there would only be a few hundred thousand Journal users at first. And theoretically once you had OneNote you would use it rather than Journal, so note import would be a one-time thing. It pained us, but we couldn't afford to take on an import feature. Before you write to ask, bear in mind that we do want to do this at some point - it is on our list. Just as is making ink as great as it should be, rather than just serviceable.

So, we ended up partly by design and partly by circumstance with two different applications which operate a little differently and don’t interoperate much at all. Welcome to version 1.0.

Update 1/2006: Fortunately, there is now a PowerToy available to import Journal notes into OneNote as ink. Yay!

Humility and handwriting

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 04:23:00 GMT

Designing the actual experience of handwriting in OneNote 2003 was quite a challenge. We didn’t want to just replicate paper, since that didn’t seem to be adding enough value. So we got quite interested in the idea of trying to determine the structure of ink. That is very hard and the subject of ongoing research, so we decided to experiment with a different approach. We’d of course let you write anywhere, but we would also show you special places to write (called “affordances” in the jargon) where we would interpret your ink as part of an outline or list structure. If any of you remember the first public beta of OneNote and had a TabletPC to try it on, there were “writing guides” visible on the page to show you where you could write to tell OneNote to link two items together, or to continue a line. You can turn these on in OneNote 2003 even now using Tools/Options – they really help if you care about structure.

We thought we were pretty clever when we designed that. But as some of us had feared, people came to think that they MUST write in the writing guides. Even if they knew they didn’t have to, writing outside the guides seemed wrong somehow, and it was distracting to cross a visual boundary you don’t have on paper. No matter how dim we made the guides, some people found them distracting, and the rest couldn’t even see them. And then the more we thought about it, the more this design seemed backward. People already knew where to write to continue a line or a list – they didn’t need us to tell them. In fact all these guides did was tell you where NOT to write if you DIDN”T want to continue a list or a line. And even that most people were pretty good at – they naturally wrote far enough away from existing stuff.

So we went back to fundamentals. What’s important with handwriting? Well, just getting the ink on the page is a big one (maybe 80% of the value at least is achieved just with that). Let’s make sure that is easy. Next might be searching the ink (say that’s 10% more). Next might be recognition to text (“reco”). About 8%? And then there is structure of the ink. Maybe that is 2%. Somehow we had got all excited as a team (me included) about the least important thing. It turns out that technology people do that all the time – its endemic.

We did what we could to fix up the ink to get the “80%” working as best we could. We also got the searching and reco of course. And there is even structure. But the whole experience is not the way we want it to be, so when we get a chance to really sit down and do it the way we want to, you’ll see great things.

BTW, one of the difficult things about finding bugs with ink (both in design and code) is being able to reproduce the problem in a developer’s office. Most bugs you can describe in a few steps, but we found very few bugs were being logged for ink even late in the product cycle. It turns out this was because the testers were embarrassed to write “draw some ink and it doesn’t work the way you expect” in the bug report. That’s not really reproducible, even with a picture of the results. So we implemented a way to capture the “wet” ink and send that directly to the developer so they could replay the ink being drawn. After awhile things got better. But then we noticed that the ink seemed to be behaving well in terms of code errors being few, but every person not familiar with “Scribbler” who tried to use it complained it was hard to use the ink. We couldn’t see it too well, but those fresh eyes could.

We organized events we called “ink-o-ramas”. We would collect about 10 people (actually Microsoft employee guinea pigs) who have never seen “Scribbler”, put them in a room, gave them Tablets, and asked them to take notes on a video taped lecture we played for them for an hour (and we gave them pizza – which didn’t go too well with the Tablets but we made do). Once people got used to Scribbler’s idiosyncratic ink interface, we had to change them out and get fresh “normal” people. We had 13 ink-o-ramas in total, each with a different focus near the end. We had one where we asked only native writers of East Asian languages to come, since those languages have a different interface for inking (Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese). We got a lot of great, raw feedback, and we were able to see people having trouble in person – the devs were in the room too. By the time we finished all this, we had the ink working well enough to ship it, and it is what you see today. But we definitely know it can be better. Much better. We have plans…

Handwriting on the wall

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 31 Jan 2004 04:13:00 GMT

When you are trying to replace a technology like paper, it helps to know how it is used. You can roughly split paper usage into two categories. What you put on the paper, and what you do with the paper. For the first question we knew we had to build a surface for recording notes that would work for ink or text (and even audio, pictures, etc), and would be as flexible as paper – or as close as we could get. But what did that really mean? We needed to know what real people did when they wrote notes. Some people guessed that there would be a lot of hierarchical notes (those of us who took notes that way). Others guessed there’d be mainly messy notes, still others thought there would be a lot of diagrams, and so on. We could argue in our hallway, or we could find out what people really do.

We started out with an effort to collect handwritten (and typed) notes. We asked about 1000 registered users of Microsoft products (who had agreed to be contacted in advance) to send us a manila envelope full of their notes (whatever that meant to them), in return for $20. We got notes from about 500 people, which we posted on the walls of our hallway (picture to come later). We categorized them into groups. People who use outlines (hardly any, confirming my bias), people who make lists, people who mix drawings and text a lot, people who write paragraphs, people who use no discernable structure, etc. We also had classes of notes like post-its, course notes, and interview notes. And notes from other countries, lawyers, notes from meetings on handouts, etc.

We put these notes on the wall because I wanted them to be easily accessible. If we ever had a discussion about whether “users do this” or “users do that”, it should be as easy as walking out into the hallway to check. And we did. Many arguments were settled pretty quickly. The “wall o’ notes” was one of the more successful things we did in the OneNote project.

The Myth

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 22:11:00 GMT

Myths are fun to believe in and perpetuate. Myths are also amazing in their immortality. But myths suck if you find yourself on the wrong side of them. Working at Microsoft on products like Word you run into a lot of myths which get repeated so often, they become treated as “fact” in the general population. Maybe I’ll talk about some of those someday (like the one where Word changes its file format every release - if people only knew how much we bend over backwards to keep that compatible).

It is sort of like having people start calling you “Bert” and then having them tell everyone they know your name is Bert, and continue to do this despite you telling them and anyone else you meet to their face that your name is Chris, not Bert. After awhile, people start to look at you funny. “My name is Chris, not Bert”. “Oh, are you going to change your name?” “Why are you lying?” “Do you have multiple personality disorder?” They even start to distrust you. But from your perspective you were always Chris, not Bert.

OneNote has one big fat myth. People think we only run on a TabletPC. If you use OneNote, you know how wrong this is. And don’t get me wrong – we run great on Tablets, we love the Tablet, and we built features to take advantage of Tablets. Every time I meet with the press or customers though, I make sure to mention that we are useful on laptops and desktops, as well as Tablets. Yet even after that, and a demo showing the power of OneNote with a keyboard and mouse, people still write that we are only available for TabletPC. Not that we are more useful on a Tablet – we ONLY run on a Tablet. Go figure. At first this was humorous, then annoying. Now though, it can be a big problem for a new business. We just did some internal research that shows the top reason why corporations don’t consider OneNote for deployment in their organization is that they do not have TabletPCs!

There are some reasons for this myth, and they are sort of self-reinforcing. For example, the Tablet was launched around the same time OneNote was announced. The word “notes” to many people means handwritten things on paper, so they think handwriting, hence Tablet. It is a testament to the power of the Tablet that when I or anyone else on the team does a demo of OneNote, we have to be careful to show all the non-Tablet features first (which people are really excited about), and then just show ink for 30sec at the end. When we didn’t do this, and showed ink first, people just got a glazed, drooling look and tuned out everything except the swoopy lines of ink on the screen. They’d walk away saying “what features”?

So the Tablet is a blessing and a curse – we thank it for making us appealing, but The Myth is killing us. So spread the word: 95% of real-life OneNote users use a laptop or desktop, and 95% of the features do not require a Tablet. Go forth and multiply that!