How to take Meeting Notes in OneNote

A young individual wearing headphones takes notes in OneNote while focused on their computer screen, surrounded by plants and stationery.

Apart from taking notes for yourself using OneNote, you can use it to take meeting notes. One thing I find about notes is that people tend to put them in lots of different places. Maybe you have some notes on a paper notebook on your desk, some on your phone, perhaps the odd Post it note here and there. You get the picture; notes can be a bit of a problem! Here’s where OneNote has a neat trick up its sleeve, it’s Meeting Notes. Let’s check it out.

One of the nice things about taking meeting notes in OneNote is that if you use Outlook, you can pull the content directly from the Outlook meeting. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Taking Meeting Notes in OneNote

In OneNote, make sure you’re on the page where you would like to take your meeting notes, or start a new page if needed. From the Home tab, click on the Meeting Details button. This opens a pane on the right that displays your meetings or appointments for the current day. Use the calendar drop down list to pick a day from the mini calendar.

The image shows a OneNote interface for organizing meeting notes, featuring a "Team Meetings" page and a calendar.

After you select a date, the meetings for that day will be displayed in the Meeting Details pane. Click the Meeting to add it to your page. Nifty!

The meeting details block shown on the page contains all the meeting details, including the date and time of the meeting, a participants list, and a heading for your notes.

The image depicts a OneNote interface for organizing meeting notes, highlighting a scheduled team meeting, from 9:30 am to 11:00 am, with links to Outlook and details like invitation messages and participants.

  • Clicking on the Participants link opens the list of participants, and you can click on any participant to start an email.
  • Clicking on the notes heading opens the meeting block so you can start typing notes.
  • The meeting block also has a link to your Outlook item. Clicking the link will open original item in Outlook.

Meeting Updates

Ok, this is good, but what happens if the meeting is moved to another day or time? No problem. At the bottom of the Meeting Details pane, you’ll see a Refresh button. All you need to do is click on the Refresh button, and you’ll see a prompt, asking you to confirm. Click Yes, update all, and just like that, your meeting will be updated with the new details.

The image shows a OneNote meeting details update prompt for a team meeting, asking to refresh and replace all existing notes with new information.

Conclusion

The ability to easily add and update Meeting notes is just one of many features that make OneNote well worth checking out. If you like the idea of keeping everything in one place, this may be a handy addition to your toolkit.

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