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Taking Meeting Notes in OneNote 2013

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This post was authored by Po-Yan Tsang, Program Manager on the Meetings Team

One of the most common scenarios for taking notes at work is during meetings - whether it is about tracking attendees, remembering what was discussed or listing out follow up items. However, meetings are often rushed and busy, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible to start taking notes and collaborating with other attendees. 

 

Meeting Notes for an Outlook Meeting

In OneNote 2013, you can start taking notes by going to Home -> Insert -> Meeting Details, which lets you choose from a list of current meetings in Outlook.  This automatically adds details about the meeting to your current page 

And it’s as easy as that – you now have a page with all the details of your meeting, so you can get right down to taking notes and still have all the context about where the meeting was and who attended the event.

We’ve also added some extra features to enrich and keep notes relevant: 

  • New Format - the participants list now has checkboxes by default, so you can track attendance
  • Up To Date Meeting Details - if you're you’re the meeting organizer and you make a change to the location or time, your notes will get updated when you send the update from Outlook. If you’re not the organizer, you can right-click on the page tab and select ‘Refresh Meeting Details’ to have it update.

 

Meeting Notes for a Lync Online Meeting

Similar to the Outlook meeting notes experience, you can also take meeting notes from Lync. Once you’ve set everything up, we will automatically update your notes page with:

  1. List of attendees
  2. Any files uploaded to the Lync Meeting
  3. Links to any other notebooks shared within this meeting.

 

Sharing Meeting Notes with Others

Why take notes on your own when you can get everyone to help out? Get others to help make sure you don’t miss an action item or a key decision in your notes. In OneNote 2013, set up a shared note taking space for everyone in the meeting is a snap. 

Before a Meeting:

  1. In the Outlook meeting request, go to the Meeting Tab -> Meeting Notes -> Share notes with the meeting
  2. Select the notebook page you want to share with the meeting. Remember, this has to be in a shared location like SkyDrive or SharePoint.
  3. Now you can send out the meeting invite, which will have a link to your Outlook meeting

 

During a Meeting:

  1. From OneNote, select the page you want to share with the meeting and go to File -> Share -> Share with Meeting
  2. You can choose an existing meeting here or create a new Lync Meeting
  3. Once a meeting is selected, a link to the OneNote page is shared with all the Lync participants

 

 

We believe that taking notes is a significant part of the meeting experience and we've put a lot of thought into improving this experience and making it effortless in OneNote 2013. If you have feedback on any of the updates and additions to these features, please let us know in the comments below.

 

Po-Yan Tsang
Program Manager on the Meetings Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2012
    These options don't exist in Outlook 2011 for the Mac!  

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2012
    Great additions!  I use this feature everyday in ON2010.  The auto-update feature for meeting details will definitely be useful to me.  

  • Anonymous
    December 17, 2012
    Cool features for SkyDrive, but some of us work in organizations that don't allow us (for many reasons) to store documents in the cloud.  I really hope you bring corporate SharePoint integration up to feature parity with SkyDrive.

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2013
    Hello, you say "2.Select the notebook page you want to share with the meeting. Remember, this has to be in a shared location like SkyDrive or SharePoint. " But how can I share it on local enterprise SharePoint2013 Team Site ? Thanks,

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2013
    Hi, I am a frequent user of the OneNote meeting notes feature. While the new features of 2013 are useful additions, the overall look and feel and formatting of the notes has suffered a bit. The OneNote 2010 had a nice table header format. Whereas the 2013 format looks a bit clumsy and disorgnised..

  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2013
    I will never want to "share notes with the meeting." How can I permanently disable the prompt that asks me each and every time I click the OneNote button to take notes on an appointment?

  • Anonymous
    October 16, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2013
    I also strongly agree with Howard and Chris.  It is frustrating that this prompt comes up everytime I right click on a meeting and try to start writing notes.  I have to click through this about 5 times a day (25x a week) since I use OneNote exclusively instead of any written notebook.  There truly needs to be a way to default to "Take notes on your own".  While I understand there are circumstances that warrant taking notes with groups of people, that happens a lot less frequently than the need to take notes on your own.

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2014
    I frequently use the "Take notes on your own" button, however it always defaults to a particular section (in fact one that I almost never use). What setting do I tweak so that Outlook makes me select a section to add the page under?

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2014
    Sounds like great feature. Can't wait to benefit by it. Immediate issues were- 1) Couldn't find the "Meeting Details" button in the Insert Pane. (Sorted. found in the 'other' insert pane !) and 2: My calendar doesn't appear. I'm assuming this is because I have several calendars and it's picking the wrong one. -  So how do you configure it to identify the correct Calendar source for the pick list? (not sorted)

  • Anonymous
    October 16, 2014
    Any idea why the participating list is not alphabetized?

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2015
    Is it mandatory for us to have Microsoft Account to access One Note that is shared in the Lync Meeting?

  • Anonymous
    February 03, 2015
    Is there a way to insert meeting details from a persons calendar that I manage within outlook?  Everytime I click meeting details it pulls only from my calendar.  I would like the option to select from different calendars I manage-is that possible?

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2015
    I thought that the new participant list with the checked attendees was really cool until I realized that much to my horror, the unchecked attendees are now included in my to-do list I generate using the Find Tags feature and showing only unchecked items. Is there a way to filter the "In Attendance" tag name out of the Tags Summary task pane without needing to ensure that meeting notes are kept in a separate notebook or section with any action items discussed during a meeting duplicated within the notebook or sections searched by the Tags Summary?

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2015
    I AM THE NEW USER OF Onenote. please help how can I use.

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2015
    Is there any visual indicator in Outlook to notify me that I have notes in OneNote for that meeting?  In other words, whether I click "meeting Details" in OneNote to select a meeting or if I click the "Meeting Notes", I've essentially "linked" the note and the appointment.  If I am in OneNote, I'll see the meeting information and there is a link to take me back to that appointment.  Is there anything in Outlook that I can click to take me FROM the meeting TO the note?  If I click to create a note, it WILL take me to the note, but there is no visual indicator that there was a note to begin with.

  • Anonymous
    April 28, 2015
    We maintain a document set of the "relevant documents for the meeting (typically 20)" in SharePoint. We want to export the documents into a single Onenote file for the attendees.

  1. Is that a good idea?
  2. How can this be achieved programmatically?

  • Anonymous
    May 06, 2015
    Agreed with the comments about "take notes on my own."  While the idea of a choice is good, It's quite frustrating to have to select this option every time I send a meeting from my calendar into OneNote.  Where is the choice to disable this and just create a note in OneNote like in the previous OneNotes??  If I want to share the notes, I'll do that from within OneNote itself.  Thanks for reading!

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2015
    Yeah, but how do I sort the meeting participants alphabetically? tracking meeting attendance for a meeting where the attendees were not original alphabetized in outlook is a major pain.

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2015
    I have been using these meeting notes for a long time, after a patch process they all disappeared.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2015
    Agreed with other comment - please bring back table formatting - it looks cleaner and easier to read. Great idea to add a checkbox for participants, but can you also add columns Attendance (Required, Optional attendee) and Response (none, accepted, declined, so on) - I keep relying on Excel still by doing copying status to Clipboard because these attributes are missing and it's hard to take attendance without it.

  • Anonymous
    August 30, 2015
    Thanks for publishing this info. In Outlook 2010, I could right click on the meeting in the To-Do bar on the right and open a meeting note page in OneNote with one click.  That functionality was eliminated in 2013.  Now I'm glad that I can open OneNote and start a meeting note page with a lot less clicks using this method in 2013. Still one more click than the old method but definitely an improvement.

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2016
    After all that above is done, and 6 months later you click on that appointment. There is no way to find your notes? This is not acceptable. I dont see any links in my outlook meeting linking to my notes in onenote? this is useless if you actually plan to lookup your notes sometime after the meeting/appointment is long over.

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2016
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2016
    how about improving how you find the notes after they are taken? There are a few ways to add notes to meetings but only way adds a link from outlook cal to the notes you took. EVERY single way you add notes NEEDS TO HAVE A LINK FROM CAL TO ONENOTE AND FROM ONENOTE TO CAL so you can find your notes when you need them or its useless.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2016
    I am unable to find Meeting Notes option in Meeting. I am using Outlook 2013,part of Microst Office 365 pro plus. Can anyone please suggest.