Gather and create notes with Copilot in your personal OneNote notebooks directly on the page

Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! My name is Primadona, and I’m a Product Manager on the OneNote team. I’m excited to announce the rollout of the new Take notes with Copilot feature for your personal notebooks in OneNote on Windows! Copilot now helps you gather and create notes using natural language prompts based on your Microsoft 365 content directly on the page.

Gather and create notes with Copilot in your personal OneNote notebooks directly on the page

If you frequently take notes in OneNote, you may spend time manually preparing meeting agendas, capturing notes during meetings, or gathering relevant information about projects to stay effective and productive at work. 

With the new Take notes with Copilot feature, you can now use a natural language prompt editor directly on the canvas to pull relevant information from sources such as Microsoft 365 documents, messages, and emails. This allows you to easily:

• Compile agendas for recurring meetings
• Collect relevant project information with associated artifacts
• Pull in key action items from team discussions
• Draft an email outline about a topic
• Write a task list for a project
• And much more

How it works

Let’s take a look at a couple scenarios that showcase how the new Take notes with Copilot feature can help you in your daily work.

Take notes with Copilot on a blank OneNote page

1. Open an existing personal notebook stored in the cloud and click the Add page button.
2. Click anywhere on the page, and then select the Copilot icon when it appears.
3. In the Take notes with Copilot box, enter a free-form natural language prompt for the task you are looking to complete, including as much detail as possible. Then select the Generate button.
4. The content created by Copilot based on your prompt is automatically inserted into the canvas. If you’re satisfied with it, select the Keep it button.
5. Copilot will include its sources so users will understand where the content referenced in the notes came from. This helps establish confidence in the accuracy of Copilot's contributions.

Enhance your notes on an existing page

1. Open an existing page in your personal notebook.
2. Click on a new empty line. You’ll see the Copilot icon appear. 
3. Click the Copilot icon when it appears, and then select Take notes with Copilot.
4. In the Take notes with Copilot box, enter a free-form natural language prompt for the task you are looking to complete, including as much detail as possible. Then select the Generate button.
5. The content created by Copilot based on your prompts is automatically inserted into the canvas. If you’re satisfied with it, click the Keep it button.

    

6. If you’re not satisfied with the results, select the Edit button.
7. Refine your prompt in the Take notes with Copilot box and then select the Generate button.
8. When reviewing Copilot’s responses, you can look at additional responses to the same prompt by selecting the Regenerate button and reviewing the responses by using the arrows.

Tips and tricks

Here are some helpful prompts to use with the Take notes with Copilot feature:
Preparing for meetings

• "Help me prepare for a meeting with [someone] next week"
• "Prepare an agenda for a meeting on [topic] with [someone]"
• "Summarize the key points from the last meeting with [someone]"

Enriching your notes

• "Help me gather relevant files, links, and notes from [meeting name], around a [topic]"
• “Create a table about [topic] with relevant files and their owners”
• "Help me gather relevant files, links, and notes from [meeting name], around a [topic]"
• "Create a table about [topic] with relevant files and their owners"
• "Add a quote from [name] on [topic]"
• "Add the definition of [keyword]"
• "Summarize this page and include key bulleted takeaways"
• "Pull together all information on the latest on [Project Contoso]"

Managing your tasks

• "Create a to-do list for the upcoming [Project Contoso]"
• "Gather tasks to follow up from my meetings on [topic]"

Known issues

• The Take notes with Copilot feature is only accessible in personal notebooks; the feature is unavailable (greyed out) in shared notebooks.
• The feature is not yet available to use with selected text on the canvas.
• As with any artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Copilot-generated content is draft copy and should always be reviewed for accuracy. Submit your feedback to help us improve the quality of responses.
• The feature is not available on locally saved notebooks.

Requirements

To use this feature in OneNote on Windows, you must have:

• A Copilot license (learn more about licenses for consumers and for businesses).
• A personal notebook that is synced to the cloud.

Availability

This feature is available to Current Channel (Preview) users running Version 2412 (Build 16.0.18227.10000) or later.

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.  

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Meet the creators

Bringing this new experience to you is a team effort, so we wanted to recognize additional key contributors to the development of this feature:

• Emmie Z.
• Shobha Venugopal
• Rana Kolta
• Mavis Rodrigues
• Priyanka Singh
• Philip Ferreira
• Lauren Kelly
• Bella Harris
• M. Mohamed
• Ryan Adriano 
• Karan Mehta

"I’m thrilled to be part of the team that built this new Copilot experience in OneNote to enhance the user experience and productivity. I look forward to seeing how this feature assists users in their notetaking workflows by habitually leveraging AI to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.” - Priyanka Singh

Feedback 

We want to hear from you! Please use the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons in Copilot or click Help > Feedback in the app to submit your thoughts.

 

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