How to use Copilot in Microsoft OneNote

What is Copilot?

Copilot is Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant that boosts productivity and streamlines workflows. Copilot is built into existing Microsoft 365 applications to help you with drafting documents, analyzing data, and managing projects while staying in the flow of work—without the need to open a separate app.

What is Copilot in OneNote?

Use Copilot in OneNote to gain clarity from your notes. Generate summaries, create task lists, and analyze your ideas from jotted-down notes to fully-formed paragraphs. Use AI prompts to brainstorm ideas or get multiple rewrites of an existing draft. Take vital aspects of meeting notes (such as discussion points, key objectives, action items, etc.) and organize them into new content like presentation outlines, event plans, or agendas. With Copilot in OneNote, organizing information becomes easier.

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How to access Copilot in OneNote

From the Home tab on the ribbon, select the Copilot button to open the Copilot pane. Here, you’ll be able to chat and interact with Copilot and receive responses to your prompts in real time.

In addition, use the on-canvas OneNote icon for a quick, seamless shortcut to Copilot directly on the page. Select the icon to get started with Copilot for tasks such as summarizing, rewriting, creating lists, or generating content ideas.

Open Copilot in OneNote for suggested prompts on enhancing your notes. These are divided into categories: Create, Understand, Edit, and Ask. Here’s what they do:

Create

Not only does Copilot in OneNote create new notes, pages, and sections from existing notes, but Copilot’s Create option breaks mental blocks when you’re stuck on a blank page. For example, begin with “get me ideas” for your topic, then specify details and the output that best fits your needs. Try these or your own prompts for Copilot Create:

• Get me ideas for planning a rainy day movie night with my family, such as popcorn recipes and family-friendly movie ideas.
• Based on the content of this notebook, create a series of interview questions to help me prepare for a new job.
• Generate a list of potential destinations for a conference based on this list of attendees and their locations: [list].

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Understand

Use the Understand option to summarize your existing notes into an email, memo, or detailed paragraph. This makes it easy to comprehend an entire section of text, identifying and focusing on specific topics or features. Try these or your own prompts:

• Summarize the text boxes in this file in the form of a bulleted list: [file].
• Create an outline from these notes that includes the dates mentioned, listed as month/day/year.
• List major keywords and phrases from the article pasted in OneNote that have potential to show up on a search engine.

Edit

Copilot in OneNote is adept at rewriting your content for tone, style, formality, and even expanding or reducing the length of passages. Clarify how you want the text to be rewritten using these or your own prompts:

• Suggest three ways to rewrite this text to sound more formal.
• Expand the following text by three more pages, focusing on these sections: [sections].
• Rewrite these notes to reduce the word count to 500 words.

Ask

Copilot in OneNote provides definitions, explanations, or related info based on your notes. This enhances your study sessions or research-based content. OneNote allows for copying and pasting data from other Microsoft 365 apps, which makes it easy to visualize different types of information such as charts, sketches, and lists. Try it yourself with these or your own prompts:

• Analyze the following chart and list how much money was generated in the fourth quarter by each department: [chart].
• What are the key takeaways from the text on pages three to five of this document? [document]
• Explain the following mathematical equations from the scanned sketch: [equations].

Tips for making the most of Copilot in OneNote

Use clear, specific instructions for your Copilot in OneNote prompts to get the results you’re looking for. Provide context for better results by keeping these tips in mind:

• Write specific prompts. Vague prompts lead to vague answers. The clearer your initial ask, the better the results that you’ll get.
• Edit Copilot’s output. Treat AI-generated content as a first draft, then personalize and fact-check as needed.
• Use Copilot alongside OneNote features. Combine with tags, sections, and OneNote’s digital ink and sketch features for richer notetaking.

Copilot transforms OneNote into a smarter tool for thinking, planning, and working with powerful AI features. Try Microsoft 365 for free and explore Copilot’s productivity-enhancing capabilities.