Taking Meeting Notes in OneNote 2013

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