How to Use OneNote for Team Notes in Microsoft 365 (With Four Tips)

Most small businesses already pay for OneNote as part of Microsoft 365, and most use it as a private scratchpad. Used as a shared notebook, it becomes something more useful: one place for meeting notes, how-we-do-it procedures, client call notes and the bits of know-how that otherwise live in one person’s head.

The difference is mostly in how you set it up.

Put the notebook somewhere the team can reach

A OneNote notebook is only shareable if it is saved in OneDrive or a SharePoint site. For team notes, choose SharePoint, or create the notebook from a Teams channel. A notebook in one person’s OneDrive belongs to that person, and when they leave you have to rescue it.

In Teams, select Add a tab at the top of a channel, choose OneNote, then create a new notebook or pick an existing one. Everyone in the channel who has access to the notebook can then view and edit it from the tab, and anyone who can’t see it can request access from there.

If you share a notebook directly instead, you choose whether each person can edit or can view, and you can change or remove that later from Manage access.

Our cloud services team sets up SharePoint and Teams so shared notebooks land in the right place with the right permissions from the start.

Agree a simple structure

OneNote is organised as notebooks, sections (the tabs) and pages. Left to themselves, people invent their own system, and nobody can find anything after six months. A few rules help:

• One notebook per team or purpose, such as “Office procedures” or “Partners’ meetings”, rather than one per person.
• Sections by topic or by month, whichever suits how people look things up later.
• One page per meeting, call or procedure, with the date at the start of the page title.

Everyone can edit at once, and changes sync for the rest of the team, so there is no more emailing round “final_v3” of the meeting notes.

A word on client and personal data

If your notes include client names, case details or staff matters, they are personal data under UK GDPR. Keep them in a notebook with tight permissions, not a company-wide one, and don’t paste in more than you need. Microsoft 365’s normal retention and access controls apply to notebooks stored in SharePoint, which is another reason not to keep them on someone’s laptop.

Four OneNote tips worth knowing

1. Capture a thought with Quick Notes

Quick Notes are OneNote’s answer to sticky notes. On Windows, press Windows + Alt + N to open one, even when OneNote isn’t running. They save automatically to the Quick Notes section of your default notebook, so they are searchable and you can move them to the right place later. On a phone, the OneNote app does the same job.

2. Search every notebook at once

Press Ctrl + E to search all your notebooks, or use the arrow next to the magnifying glass to narrow it to the current page, section or notebook. OneNote searches typed text and handwriting, and can also find text in images and words in recordings.

One catch: password-protected sections aren’t included in searches until you unlock them.

3. Pull in Outlook meeting details

In the OneNote desktop app, choose Home > Meeting Details and pick a meeting from your Outlook calendar. OneNote adds the date, location, attendees and agenda to the page as text, so every set of meeting notes starts the same way. You need Outlook and OneNote installed on the same computer for this to work.

4. Get back an earlier version of a page

Shared notes get edited by mistake. In the desktop app, go to History > Page Versions to see earlier versions of a page, then right-click one and choose Restore Version. In OneNote on the web, it is under View > Page Versions. Deleted pages sit in Deleted Notes for a while, so they can usually be recovered too.

Things that have changed since we first wrote this

A few things in older OneNote advice no longer apply:

• OneNote for Windows 10 is read-only. Microsoft ended support on 14 October 2025. You can still open and export notes in it, but not edit them. Use the OneNote app for Windows, and check every notebook has synced before you switch, or unsynced notes won’t come across.
• Microsoft Lens has gone. The scanning app many people used to send documents into OneNote was retired in early 2026, and scanning stopped working on 9 March 2026. Microsoft now points people to the scanner built into the OneDrive app.
• Copilot can summarise your notes. If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, Copilot in OneNote can summarise a page, pull out a task list or tidy up rough notes. See our AI and Copilot page if you are weighing that up.

Be careful with section passwords

You can password-protect a section by right-clicking it and choosing Password Protect This Section, and set it to lock again after a period of inactivity. That is handy for, say, HR notes in a shared notebook.

But Microsoft is blunt about the risk: if you forget the password, nobody can unlock the section, not even Microsoft support. Store any section passwords in your company password manager, and for genuinely sensitive material, rely on SharePoint permissions rather than a password only one person knows.

Getting started

Pick one job OneNote can take over, such as weekly team meeting notes, set up the notebook in SharePoint or Teams, and agree the structure before anyone starts typing. Once that habit sticks, procedures and client notes tend to follow.

If you’d like help setting up Microsoft 365 so shared notes, files and permissions work the way your team does, get in touch.