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The quick answer is that, no, it doesn't have to be annealed to make a knife from it. Doing so will make the rest of the work easier but then you have to re-harden it (but that will probably give you a better blade). Not annealing makes the work a little harder but cuts out the re-hardening step (although that leaves you with a blade that is hardened to be a saw which is much softer than a knife blade should be).
Generally, knives made from those blades are simply hacked out and shaped by whatever methods you have available. This is especially true when the maker is very new to knife making. Such knives will give fair performance in most cases. The exception would be if that saw blade has carbide teeth attached to the tips of the cutting edges. In that case, the rest of the blade is likely either mild steel which is no good for knives or it could be a fair grade of carbon steel but it won't be hardened enough to make a good knife.
Drilling holes in a saw blade might or might not be difficult, depending on your drills and exactly how hard that blade was made and what it was made from. No way to know these things until you try. All that being the case, you're making a very common mistake that many new knife makers make by trying to use salvaged steel before you've had the experiences that would allow you to evaluate that steel so that you can make an informed judgement as to its suitability for a knife. For most beginners its a much better choice to simply buy a piece of good blade steel for your first knife. That steel is already annealed so it will be easy to work with. The downside is that you'll have to harden it BUT after you do harden it you will have a much better blade than you would have had from the saw blade. There are some Sticky threads at the top of this forum that explain some of these considerations in greater detail and I encourage you to read through them. After that, you'll be in a better position to decide how you want to proceed...
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