The need to balance multiple projects and workloads means that your work week is probably rammed with different meetings and discussions for each. Taking notes for these meetings, and finding them afterwards, can become a bit of a frustrating “which notebook are my notes in?” style nightmare. In addition, after the meeting, you then need to type up your notes, summarise them, save them somewhere, circulate them, and then update them before the next meeting with any incomplete actions, notes on decisions etc.
Fortunately, there’s a highly powerful but greatly underused Office 365 tool that can help simplify all these things: Microsoft OneNote.
Taking notes for meetings is ingeniously simple in OneNote: You can insert meeting details into a Notebook in just a few clicks, for instant sharing, collaboration, and updates.
Meeting Notes in OneNote
1) In the Home tab, select ‘Meeting Details’. Because OneNote is integrated with Office 365, your meetings for today will automatically be pulled through and recommended to you.
2) If you want to choose a meeting from a different date, simply can click ‘Choose a Meeting from Another Day’ and navigate through to the date and meeting you want to make notes for:
3) Choose your meeting and click on ‘Insert Details’. OneNote will automatically insert all the information about that meeting that is available in Outlook, including the Subject, Date, Location, a link to the Outlook calendar item, the invite message, any attached files or media, and a list of participants as below:
4) Clicking on ‘Expand’ next to the Invitation Message shows you a preview of the invite as it was sent out:
Meeting Notes in Outlook
You can also access the OneNote Notebook and meeting notes from directly within the Outlook calendar event. In every Outlook event, under the ‘Meeting’ tab, you will see a ‘Meeting Notes’ option:
Clicking this option allows you to either share OneNote notes with the meeting and all its participants, or to take your own private notes:
You will then be given the option of choosing to take notes in an existing Notebook, or create a new one:
Once you’ve chosen a location for your notes, if you’ve chosen to share notes, a link to their location will automatically be added to the calendar event, for easy access when needed:
Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our favourite features in OneNote for tackling common workplace issues, and would love to hear your suggestions.
If you’re using OneNote, what do you think is the most useful feature? What features would you like to see soon? If you aren’t, have a play and let us know how you get on in the comments below!
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The Business Cloud Integration team offer guidance and support for the entire lifecycle of your SharePoint deployment, from initial guidance and Office 365 roadmap planning, through to SharePoint design, build, development, and training.
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