I have complained about Microsoft's bloated Office suite in this column for four-and-a-half years, and can finally see the beginning of the end in the next unwanted version, due this summer.

In August 1998 I ranted against Office 2000, and in April 2001 I complained about Office XP. I argued that it was created in order to produce nicely formatted sheets of paper with text, numbers or pictures. In the digital age, most of us just want to create content and not bother with formatting.

Outlook was the first program aimed specifically at the digital world, and very useful it is too. It will be joined in the forthcoming version of Office by Microsoft OneNote, a new application for managing notes.

OneNote is essentially an electronic version of a paper notebook. It does away with files, replacing them with customisable tabbed pages, which are linked to content in HTML format. It allows free-form entry anywhere on the page. When installed on a desktop or notebook computer, input is via keyboard or microphone. However, it really comes into its own with a Tablet PC or Smart Display, whose touch-sensitive screens allow handwritten notes and diagrams to be input.

OneNote will allow users to organise, access, search, re-use and share notes, combining the flexibility of handwritten notes with the power of a computer. It looks very useful and ideal for gathering and storing information from diverse sources - a capability we all need when researching or when preparing content.

The idea came from a discussion about the lack of software to track and deal with personal "ephemeral information", intended primarily for ourselves as opposed to others. The ephemeral information may be the result of meetings, lectures, email messages, phone calls, reading, browsing the Internet, or casual conversations.

A survey carried out by Microsoft Research found that 91 percent of us regularly take down handwritten notes, but only 26 percent transfer them to digital format and 23 percent of us often can't find the notes we have made anyway.

Such notes typically never make it into a digital document, and Microsoft says the kind of information captured in OneNote is often not meant to be printed out. However, the information is still valuable to users in its rough, original form. The intention is to help people be more productive, so a single click in another application will bring up a small OneNote window.

Microsoft seems to expect us to copy and paste from OneNote into Word when preparing content. It certainly doesn't sound like the electronic content-creation application I have been wanting as a modern replacement for Word. I am also dubious about the whole concept of trying to model an electronic application on a physical metaphor like the notebook. This simply drags legacy thinking into the electronic world.

Nevertheless, I welcome a new application aimed at the electronic world and not the physical one. My hope is that users will find it easier to prepare their written content in OneNote, rather than Word, and will ask for additional functionality. All it needs is the grammar, spellchecking and word-count functions from Word.

I hope that it will quickly evolve into a 21st century replacement for Word, which was designed to meet 20th century needs.

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