Copilot in OneNote

Overview

Your OneNote notebooks are full of valuable information—meeting notes, project details, research, and reference material accumulated over months or years. But finding what you need when you need it takes too long, and turning raw notes into usable deliverables requires manual effort.

Copilot in OneNote can summarize your notes, generate new content from them, organize messy pages, and search across notebooks to find buried information in seconds.

What You’ll Learn

• Summarize: How to get quick summaries of pages and sections
• Generate: How to create new content from your existing notes
• Organize: How to restructure and clean up your notebooks
• Search: How to find specific information across all your notes

Script

Hook: Your notes are more useful than you think

Your OneNote notebooks are full of valuable information—meeting notes, project details, research you’ve collected over months. But finding what you need when you need it takes too long.

Copilot in OneNote can summarize, organize, generate, and search your notes in seconds. In the next six minutes, you’ll learn how to make your notes work for you.

Summarizing notes with Copilot

Open OneNote and launch Copilot from the ribbon. The Copilot pane opens on the right, ready to work with your current page or section.

Summarize a single page by asking “Summarize this page.” For meeting notes, try “What are the key decisions from these meeting notes?” or “List the action items from this page.” Copilot pulls out exactly what you ask for.

You can also summarize entire sections. Ask “Summarize all notes in this section” and Copilot processes every page and delivers a consolidated summary. Try “What are the main themes across these meeting notes?” to identify patterns.

Here’s a government example. You have a month of weekly team meeting notes. Ask Copilot to summarize them and extract all action items assigned to your team. In seconds, you have a comprehensive list—work that would normally take 30 minutes of manual review.

Tips for better summaries: use headings and bullet points consistently, because structured notes produce better results. One limitation—Copilot works with typed and pasted text only. Handwritten ink notes are not processed.

Generating content in OneNote

Copilot can create new content from your existing notes, turning OneNote into a productivity engine.

Transform notes into deliverables. Ask “Draft a project status update based on my notes from this week” or “Create a to-do list from the action items in this section.” Try “Write a summary email based on these meeting notes” to generate communication-ready content.

Copilot also generates plans and outlines. Try “Create a project plan outline based on my notes about the migration” or “Draft an agenda for next week’s team meeting based on open items.”

You can add context to existing notes too. Ask “Add background information about zero trust to this page” or “Expand on the bullet points in this section.”

Here’s a government use case. You’ve collected scattered notes from stakeholder meetings over several weeks. Ask Copilot to consolidate them into a requirements document, or draft a briefing outline from months of project notes. What took hours now takes minutes.

Important: always review generated content for accuracy before sharing.

Organizing and structuring notes

Messy notes are universal. You take notes quickly during a meeting, and the result is a wall of text. Copilot can fix that.

Try “Organize this page into sections with headings” or “Reformat these notes into a structured outline.” For messy meeting notes, ask “Rewrite these notes with clear categories: decisions, action items, discussion points.” Copilot reorganizes raw notes into the categories that matter most.

Copilot can also create templates for future use. Ask it to build a meeting notes template with standard sections, generate a project tracking page layout, or create a weekly status report structure. These templates give you consistent formats that make future notes easier to write and easier for Copilot to summarize later.

Here’s a government example. You took rapid notes during an ATO planning session—everything went down in a rush with no organization. Ask Copilot to reorganize those notes into a structured checklist with categories for documentation requirements, technical controls, and timeline milestones. You can also create a standardized meeting notes format that your whole team can adopt.

Tips: clean up notes right after meetings while context is fresh. Summarize sections before they get too long. Keep one notebook per major project so Copilot has focused content.

Finding information across notebooks

Copilot helps you find buried information without browsing through pages. Search with natural language: “What did we decide about the timeline in our last project meeting?” or “Find all notes mentioning the compliance review.”

Copilot searches across your current notebook. Ask specific questions for targeted results rather than broad searches.

Here’s a government example. Ask “What security requirements did we identify in the stakeholder meetings?” or “Find all references to the ATO timeline.” Copilot surfaces what you need without manual scrolling.

Limitations: Copilot works with the current notebook by default. Very large notebooks take longer to process. Handwritten notes and images are not searchable. Best practice: keep related information in the same notebook for better results.

Close: Make your notes work for you

Copilot in OneNote summarizes, generates, organizes, and searches your notes. Open your most-used notebook, launch Copilot, and start with a summary. You’ll be surprised what you’ve forgotten is in there.

Sources & References

• Welcome to Copilot in OneNote — Official guide for Copilot in OneNote including feature overview and getting started instructions
• Microsoft 365 Copilot overview — Overview of Copilot capabilities across all applications including OneNote
• Copilot in OneNote FAQ — Frequently asked questions about Copilot in OneNote including limitations and supported content types
• Microsoft Copilot adoption resources — Adoption resources and best practices for organizations