"It will be less confusing to users not to have to switch back and forth between applications," Kolb said. International Acceptance

Earlier this month, the International Standards Organization accepted the ODF as an international standard for saving and exchanging digital office documents, an important move for many IT organizations looking for alternatives to proprietary business applications.

"The game-changer that ODF represents is that it allows you to retrieve information from a document without opening it," said Anne MacFarland, an analyst at The Clipper Group Inc. in Wellesley, Mass.

The format also improves the process of exchanging information, letting "businesses be less clumsy in the ways they do business electronically," she said. "It's a first step in a new dexterity for business information."

Amy Wohl, an analyst at Wohl Associates Inc. in Narberth, Pa., said the updated Notes version will let users better share documents with others. Such interoperability is "where all this is coming from. I think it's a good thing," she said.