Notes has emerged in the last three years as the most important Lotus product, surpassing the 1-2-3 spreadsheet and other office productivity tools on which the company was built.

The company says this puts the spreadsheet more in step with other Lotus products, but the real reason is probably that rival spreadsheets had higher numbers.

Lotus has put 1-2-3-4 in a bright yellow box (a color that will be standard for all Lotus products from now on).

The Lotus product provides only very limited support for other file formats.

Massive software piracy and third-party sales of Lotus products were costing the company millions of dollars a year.

But the Lotus product would have been broadly available to anyone with a personal computer.

He said that a goal of the changes was to help users of other I.B.M. software get more out of Lotus products.

Richard Wolf, the Lotus official who oversaw Lotus's development of the new interface, said the command structure would be incorporated into future Lotus products.

IBM uses ODF in one of its less popular Lotus products or at least did so at the time.

The company is touting Compete 5 as its answer to Improv, but it didn't look a patch on the Lotus product.