OneNote Notebooks can serve a variety of purposes including personal notes such as lists, meeting or research notes, and collaborative classroom notebooks. In this module, you will learn how to get started creating, using, and collaborating on OneNote notebooks.

OneNote Notebooks can be used privately for individual notes or shared with others including colleagues, supervisors, and students. Once they are stored in a common location such as OneDrive or SharePoint, you can share and collaborate on them.

Ways to Use OneNote Notebooks

Individual Uses

All Penn State Microsoft 365 users can create a personal OneNote Notebook to:

manage a list.
upload lecture files and take annotated notes for class.
manage an interview, or any recording, with text to speech.
prepare questions and record the interview for later transcription.
use the speech recognition tool to transcribe the interview as it occurs.
scan and manage receipts for budgeting, taxes, and reconciliations.

Department or Unit Uses

All Penn State Microsoft 365 users can create a OneNote Notebook in a department or unit to:

easily access Outlook meetings, details, and add notes.
add a meeting agenda or conference itinerary to a OneNote page and take notes in the same location. These can be shared with others in the unit or a supervisor.
capture Web-based documents or pages from vendors, venues, suppliers, service providers, etc. for easy access and organization.
collaborate on daily questions and tasks.

Research Uses

All Penn State Microsoft 365 users can create a OneNote Notebook in a research environment to:

capture, organize, and annotate Web-based documents or pages.
import articles from the Web using the OneNote Web Clipper. Capture an entire page as a screenshot image or select regions to insert as editable text and images.
convert images to text.
quickly locate key terms and topics for research using Researcher for Windows 10. Once located, text and/or images can be captured and added to OneNote pages.

Use OneNote in Your Classroom

How to Use OneNote for Teaching and Learning (External resource)