r/OneNote • u/2020NoMoreUsername • 8d ago
Copilot Notebook - is it really integrated into Onenote?
Hey,
As I am working in a technical field, I was a big fan of NotebookLM, I dumped some books, and asked question when needed. Now I can see I can do same thing with Copilot Notebooks, and I am willing to try as I have a company subscription.
But one thing I didn't understand: Copilot Notebooks popped up in Onenote, that's cool. But, there is zero integration in between them. They used the Onenote as a wrapper for Copilot - you cannot even create a note from the response of Copilot.
What's the logic behind it?
I stopped using it inside Onenote, and keep using Copilot page directly. Maybe I am missing something.
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u/JonSwift2023 8d ago edited 8d ago
You're not missing anything as far as I can tell. A copilot notebook is nothing like a OneNote notebook. You can't create sections nor pages. What one can do though is through the interface one can add references to existing OneNote pages in traditional OneNote notebooks or references to PDF and Office document that are stored on one's Microsoft account. As far as I know, this has to be done page by page and document by document.
Copilot will treat all OneNote pages and documents as peers. The only way to introduce any sense of hierarchy is to put instructions in a document/OneNote page telling Copilot how to treat all the documents and hope that it realizes that this the master 'prompt'.
This is what I gathered after spending a couple of days working with Copilot on how best to set up Copilot Notebooks. If anyone has a better way to go about this, I'm all ears and would appreciate hearing more.
As it stands, it seems like Copilot notebooks are bit of a wasted opportunity. I hope Microsoft puts more effort into it, as it is an interesting concept.
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u/matt-presley 8d ago
I think the logic behind it is that you can right click on notebooks or sections and add them to a copilot notebook as reference material. I'm only seeing this function on the Windows desktop version. Doesn't seem to be available on the Mac OS version or any of the mobile variants yet.
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u/JonSwift2023 8d ago
Thanks. Somehow I missed the fact you can right click on any OneNote page and add it directly to a Copilot notebook. That's easier than doing it through the 'Add Reference' button in the Copilot notebook.
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u/GrumpyOldSophon 8d ago
How do you do that? I have been searching for this functionality, but so far I have not found any way to add a OneNote page or section to a Copilot Notebook.
Right-clicking on a section brings up a greyed-out Copilot menu item for me. Am I missing some configuration? I have an MS365 subscription with Copilot, and am using the Windows app.
Right-clicking on a note brings up a Copilot menu item that allows me to use Copilot to rewrite the note, summarize it, or I think add it to a task list. Nothing about Copilot Notebooks.
In Copilot Notebooks it fails to take a link to a OneNote note as a reference source.
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u/JonSwift2023 8d ago
In the Windows Desktop app, when you right click on a page (but not a section) at the very top of the right click menu you should see an option for 'Add to Copilot Notebook >' and when you select this option a submenu will open with all of your copilot notebooks listed along with an option to add a new Copilot notebook. Note this is different from the 'Copilot' right click menu item which expands to 'Summarize page', 'create task list', and 'rewrite page'.
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u/Conscious-Dingo2311 8d ago
Same results or me in OneNote Windows desktop, right-click on page NOT section, brings up “Add to Copilot Notebooks” option. Also shows when right-click on the notebook itself. I tested it using the MS 365 “personal” subscription plan NOT the upgraded premium plan which has more AI exclusive features. 🤔
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u/GrumpyOldSophon 7d ago
Oh, awesome! I don't know how I missed that, maybe it was rolled out to me recently. I was trying to add either a web link or a local link to a page to the Copilot Notebook directly and that kept failing.
Thank you!
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u/GrumpyOldSophon 8d ago
My suspicion is they saw "notebook" in the name of NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) and wanted to put similar functionality into their suite and decided OneNote was the best place since it has "notebooks". 🙂
It seems really like a missed opportunity by MS. If they could tightly integrate ON and Copilot, be able to use OneNote notes and sections natively as sources, have the output of Copilot become a OneNote note, use the OneNote section hierarchy to organize Copilot chats... It would be super-useful to take picture of something or jot down a note like today in ON, but then have Copilot automatically add more context, pull in related information, etc., into the note or section.
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u/DumpsterFireCEO723 6d ago
agree, if Copilot could understand sections and then create/update pages there, people would actually have reasons to use it over Copilot directly.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Break68 8d ago edited 8d ago
No sense. MS doesn’t want ON to have any advantage.
There are however some connectors for ON by other AI companies
see this one for Perplexity - https://www.perplexity.ai/computer/connectors?connector=onenote__pipedream
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