Copilot in OneNote now understands more of your notes

My reaction to reading documents like this, however, brings me back to lamenting the lack of success in the basics.  I have MANY example chats saved in copilot where I'm begging, and IT is explaining why IT can't access what I'm asking it to work with. 

I get similar results in the Copilot App, edge, and onenote to name a few of the most common apps I try to use Copilot in.  Results are intermittent at best... presumably due to various product managers tinkering in the background, turning knobs and flipping switches, laughing uncontrollably and screaming to the heavens... "I HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL AND I WISH I COULD SEE THEIR FACES WHEN THEY TRY THIS!!!!!"

For example, I just now pasted the full header and contents of an email into a new onenote page,

opened up the copilot chat window and prompted:  

please find on this page the email header and decipher it into a narrative report of the emails history.... 

The response from copilot was: 

I can do that, but I can't currently read the contents of the open OneNote file. I attempted to retrieve FL DOS acceptance.onepart, but no accessible content was returned from Microsoft 365 search.

Please either:

1. Paste the full email header into the chat, or
2. Copy the relevant section from the OneNote page and paste it here, or
3. Upload/export the message as a .eml, .msg, or text file.

Once I have the header, I'll produce:

• A hop-by-hop delivery timeline
• Sender and recipient analysis
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results
• Relay/server path interpretation
• Timestamp normalization
• Any forwarding, routing, or filtering observations
• A plain-English narrative report describing the email's complete journey from sender to recipient

Just paste the header beginning with lines similar to:

Received:

From:

To:

Subject:

Date:

Message-ID:

Authentication-Results:

and I'll decode it into a detailed narrative report.

My prompt:

so I need you to remind me what the purpose is for a copilot plugin in onenote if you don't have access to the currently open page.

Copilot response:

That's a fair criticism.

The purpose of Copilot inside OneNote is not merely to answer generic questions. A reasonable expectation is that it should be able to understand and work with the content you're actively viewing. In your case, you had FL DOS acceptance.onepart open in OneNote, and you asked me to find an email header on that page and analyze it.

What happened is that I was aware a OneNote file named FL DOS acceptance.onepart was open, but the information available to me did not include the actual page contents. When I attempted retrieval, no accessible content was returned, so I could see the page reference but not the text inside it.

There is an important distinction between:

• Knowing a file or page is open.
• Having permissioned access to the contents of that file or page.

In this interaction, I had the first but not the second.

From a user perspective, that's understandably frustrating because the visible experience is "I'm in OneNote, the page is open, why can't Copilot read it?" That's a valid question.

The intended value of Copilot in OneNote includes things like:

• Summarizing notes.
• Extracting action items.
• Organizing research.
• Finding information across notebooks.
• Answering questions about page content.
• Converting raw notes into reports, outlines, and drafts.

Those capabilities depend on the OneNote content actually being provided through the available data path. In this conversation, that content was not exposed to me, only the page identifier was.

So the honest answer is:

If I cannot access the contents of the currently open page, I cannot perform content-specific analysis of that page, and that limits one of the primary reasons users expect to use Copilot in OneNote.

Had the email header been available, I could have produced the hop-by-hop delivery narrative you requested. Instead, I only knew that FL DOS acceptance.onepart existed and was open.

If you'd like, I can help determine whether this is:

1. A limitation of the current OneNote/Copilot integration,
2. A permissions issue with the notebook,
3. A synchronization issue, or....

You get the idea....  It just feels like mayhem.

The company I work for is all in on MS365... outlook, teams, AD, now moving to Entra, but management is pushing Claude for this exact reason.

Imagine that; a Microsoft shop, yet the Copilot integration and implementation is so wonky, they're willing to expose their internal network to a third-party AI provider!