What’s New with Microsoft’s OneNote?
Microsoft’s OneNote has some updates and feature enhancements that lawyers may find appealing. The OneNote note taking application has been around since 2002 and bundled with the Office suite since 2010. OneNote is a great way to keep notes, tasks, screenshots, and more with links to context like emails and documents. It works well on smartphones, tablets, convertible devices with touch screens and of course Macs and PCs.
Add Meeting Details
If you use the Outlook calendar to keep track of meetings and appointments, you can now add the details from that event from your Outlook calendar directly into OneNote with a click. This is especially handy for starting your meeting notes with some context.
Consider this workflow. Someone emails you with a question. You respond and you converse via email, sharing a document or two. At some point you realize this would be more productive as a live conversation and you establish a time to meet. To set up the meeting you click “Reply with Meeting” to the email thread and set up the meeting in Teams.
Before the meeting you open OneNote and click on the new Meeting Details button on the Ribbon. Choose the meeting from the drop-down menu. This will add information about the date and time, participants, the email thread, and documents, and more about the meeting. Below all the context it starts an area called “Notes” to add your notes about the meeting. If record your meeting you can link to the recording in Stream from OneNote.
Soon, if your meeting is via Microsoft Teams, the Meeting Details button will also add an intelligent meeting recap, including AI generated meeting notes, AI suggested tasks, Loop collaborative notes, and more.
OneNote Replaces Wikis in Teams
In Microsoft Teams you can create workspaces (Teams) for collaboration. Within a Teams workspace you can add multiple topical channels. By default, a “General” channel is created when you create a Teams workspace. In the past the channels automatically created a “Posts” tab for threaded discussion, a “Files” tab to share files and collaborate, and a “Wiki” tab for free-flowing notes. Recently Microsoft replaced the Wiki and now a OneNote notebook is created for new workspaces.
The OneNote notebook for the Teams workspace and channels is stored in SharePoint, thus it is automatically shared with the people who have access to the Teams Workspace. Individuals will also see the OneNote notebook appear in their list of notebooks when they open OneNote on their desktop, in the browser, or on their mobile device. In OneNote the Teams workspace appears as a Notebook, and each Channel appears as a Section in the Notebook. This makes it easy to open the OneNote app on the go and add notes to share with your channel.
Add a Quick Note
If you are working on your Windows desktop and have the OneNote application installed you can add a screenshot, typed note, or drawing if you have a touchscreen to the Quick Notes in OneNote. This is handy so you can capture a thought without having to stop and open OneNote then navigate to a Notebook/Section/Page. If you want to move the Quick Note later just open OneNote and copy/paste the note to a different Notebook/Section/Page. How do you do this? Remember the shortcut = Windows key + N.
OneNote Feed
Another way to add a quick note in Windows is to create a sticky note. Sticky Notes are part of Windows 10. You can create a sticky note and pin it to your desktop, but you can also sync sticky notes across devices and on the web. Recently in OneNote a button appeared in the top right corner. If you hover your mouse over, it says “Feed”. Click to open a panel on the right side that lets you see information from your OneNote notebooks and your Sticky Notes. The Feed shows you your OneNote notes and sticky notes in chronological order (newest at the top) and has a search feature. This is a handy way to quickly access Sticky Notes, Quick Notes, and content you have added to Notebooks/Sections/Pages in OneNote in one place.
Vertical Tabs
If you like the look of OneNote in the browser more than the installed desktop version, you can make a few changes to the look of the desktop version to make the interface similar.
In the OneNote software installed on your desktop go to View – Tabs Layout and choose “Vertical Tabs”. This will align all your notebooks on a vertical panel to the left, which you can then shrink or expand by clicking on the three horizontal bars icon.
If you also like the truncated Ribbon in the browser, click on the carat icon on the bottom right of the ribbon and choose “Simplified Ribbon”.
Transcribe
In addition to Dictation in OneNote, you can now record and transcribe. In the Home tab click “Transcribe” in the Voice group. You can start recording a voice note and then have it transcribed, or you can upload an audio file and it will transcribe it for you.
Conclusion
There are more features added to OneNote in the Fall 2023 update. If you haven’t explored OneNote, it is a very robust and flexible way to keep organized. Read more in this article – Microsoft OneNote: Your Electronic Trapper Keeper and watch this tutorial video to learn more.