Meeting Minutes OneNote Tip!

Blog post: 2 minute read.

I read in a recent blog post by PC World that “OneNote is the best Microsoft program you’re likely not using”. I’m not sure whether this is true or not but for those of you who are regular OneNote users, this post is for you. For those of you who are not regular users of this program, I encourage you to check it out – it’s a great productivity tool.

Here is a simple, effective, timesaving tip for sharing meeting minutes from OneNote. Although the features used to do this are not new, I find myself regularly showing this tip to users who are unaware of this handy integration. This would be great to share in a “Tips & Tricks with OneNote” training session!

Tools used: OneNote and Outlook

I’m a OneNote fan and I use it to organize many things throughout my workday. This is also where I take meeting minutes.

Once the meeting is done and the minutes are entered on a OneNote page, you can share the minutes including the meeting details with the attendees right from OneNote. It only takes a few clicks. Here’s how…

Note: although you can insert meeting details onto the OneNote page using the ‘Meeting Details’ button in either OneNote Online or OneNote 2016/2013/2010, you cannot email a page from OneNote Online. Because of this, I use the OneNote client when sharing meeting minutes.

1. From the OneNote page containing your meeting minutes, select the Meeting Details icon on the ribbon.
2. When you select this icon, a dropdown of all meetings from your Outlook calendar for the current day will appear. Very handy!
3. Select the meeting you were writing the minutes for. When you do, the meeting subject, date, time, location, invitation details and meeting participants will be automatically inserted into the top of the OneNote page as follows:Note: I like to select the checkbox beside each participant to indicate who was present at the meeting.
4. Email the minutes to the participants by selecting the Email Page icon on the ribbon.
5. This will automatically add everyone that was invited to the meeting as recipients of the email message (Also very handy!) and will copy the contents of the OneNote page as the content of the email message.
6. Send the message – minutes are done!

I often have the meeting minutes sent before I even leave the meeting room!

Simple yet effective and a great timesaver – always a good thing.

Thanks for reading.

-JCK