Adding to OneNote Meeting Notes via Mobile

As you all know, I’ve been a fanboy of OneNote pretty much from Day 1. As an Office Apps & Services MVP, I try to stay up to date on all of the latest innovations with each of my favorite tools and solutions — and try to participate in all of the OneNote calls. I’m always happy to share some of the latest stuff in OneNote, but sometimes it’s also great to share details on an often missed feature. So it is with the ability to create and share OneNote as part of a meeting invite (which you’re all familiar with) and then *add to* those shared notes via your mobile device.

This is a tip that I originally shared in the August 2019 Productivity Tips webinar with Tom Duff (@duffbert) and which you can find on the blog and in our webinar recording on the CollabTalk YouTube page. You can also jump to the specific tip in the video by clicking here.

Create your Shared OneNote

Ok, let’s walk through this tip step by step: Within any new meeting invitation, you have the option to add OneNote meeting notes to any outgoing meeting invite. Within your Outlook calendar, open a new meeting, give it a Subject and Location, and set your start and end dates and times.

From the Appointment menu, simply select Meeting Notes and the familiar OneNote icon.

A dialog box appears with a couple options. Select either Share Notes with the Meeting or Take Notes on Your Own.

Regardless of your choice, a dialog box opens for you to determine from which OneNote notebook to capture these new meeting notes. If you’re like me, you have multiple personal and organizational locations to select from. You can always move or share individual notes later. For the purpose of this example, any option will work.

Once selected, the meeting notes will now appear within your new meeting, and a corresponding OneNote page will be generated.

 

Add to OneNote using your Mobile Device

Within OneNote in the target notebook, a new page is created with your meeting information, making this new notes repository instantly searchable. And in seconds, the same page appears within the mobile application.

And here’s where the real magic happens. Once this new shared notebook is visible from your OneNote mobile app, you can add to it through your mobile device. That means you can quickly and easily capture audio, video, and notes — which is a *fantastic* and flexible way to add context to your notes. The real-time editing means that multiple people can add or edit notes at the same time. And if you lose your wifi connection, it will sync as soon as you’re back online.

For example, if your connection is weak, you might capture the entire audio of a meeting and post it to the notebook as an attachment. Or capture a video.

Or take snapshots of the room, your whiteboard drawings, the people in attendance, and whatever critical documents you want to capture as part of the “official record” for the meeting, and have all of them sync with the online notebook.

 

The point here is that your mobile device becomes a powerful tool for capturing non-traditional notes and content within OneNote. And I bet most of you had no idea you could do any of this.

You’re welcome.