Chris Pratley: One percent for art: Napkin Math a.k.a. The Calculator in OneNote 2007

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Chris Playing the “OneNote Sax” that plays.., you guessed it — “One Note”

Chris Pratley of the Microsoft OneNote dev team wrote quite the “tongue in cheek” post in his blog tonight. Napkin Math? You gotta read it to understand it …!

“When I am sitting in a meeting or just at my desk trying to work my thoughts out it often happens that I need to do a little math. In these cases I am already in OneNote, either taking notes or capturing my thoughts in some way. Now I need to know what our install size is going to be if we remove a few components, or what % of our dev budget the napkin math feature will be. So I could reach for a calculator or try to find the one built in to Windows, or maybe launch Excel. If I did, it would take awhile, it’s a context switch, and I might get “the answer” but I would have no record of the calculation or how I did it unless I typed it into OneNote. Hmm. What if I just type it in to OneNote right there in my notes?”

“Napkin math falls into the “art” category because it clearly isn’t a top priority for our customers (zero people asked for it) or the vision for the product or any other budget category. But it is cool, it works just as I want when I need it, it is different, and it makes me love my software. We’ve already got a few smiles from our beta users about it”.

It also gives a pretty good bit of insight into what is in Chris’ head as he works on this dev team (a little scary there Chris)Head over and check this one out…..