OneNote has been the reliable place where great ideas, meeting minutes, and web clippings go live, but often end up forgotten. I often stare at my large notebook and OneDrive library, knowing the answer is buried somewhere in a subpage or in a Word document from three months ago, but lacking the time to dig it out.

Copilot Notebooks changes the situation entirely. It transforms OneNote and OneDrive from a passive storage bin into an active, intelligent layer. If you have been sleeping on OneNote lately (I don’t blame you), it’s time to wake up; Microsoft just added the one feature that makes it the most powerful tool in the Office 365 suite.

What is a Copilot Notebook anyway?

And how to enable it

When I first heard about Copilot in OneNote, I thought it would just be another sidebar that could summarize my messy meeting notes. But Copilot Notebooks is much more than that.

Here, you can create an AI-powered notebook that’s completely different from your traditional one. Once you give it a relevant name, you can include notes and files from OneDrive and local storage.

After you upload all the relevant sources to a notebook, you can start asking relevant questions. Copilot uses all uploaded sources to get you answers quickly. I can now stop digging through folders. I just talked to it.

It’s the first time OneNote has felt like it actually understands the context of what I’m working on, rather than just acting as a digital filing cabinet. As of right now (early 2026), this full Copilot Notebook experience is available on Windows only.

If you are on a Mac or the web, you might only see a Copilot icon at the top. Once you have a relevant Microsoft 365 plan with Copilot capabilities, head to OneNote on Windows and look for Copilot Notebooks on the sidebar.

Now that you have a rough idea of Copilot Notebooks, let’s create one and check it in action.

Create a Copilot Notebook

Supports multiple file types

When I want to start a new project, I don’t just create a section and start typing anymore. I go straight to the Copilot Notebooks tab to build my project or research brain.

Creating one is surprisingly simple. I just hit the Create Notebook button and gave it a clear, relevant title — something like ‘Q3 Product Launch Strategy’ or ‘Client X Onboarding.’

Once I name the notebook, the real magic happens in the References area. I can add files from the local storage, my OneDrive library, or even manually write notes. It supports PDF, PPT, Excel, and Word files.

Suppose you are managing a complex home renovation. You can create a new Copilot Notebook titled Home Remodel and add a PDF of the contractor’s quote, an Excel sheet of budget and material costs, a Word doc with your wife’s must-have design ideas, and a manual note where you type out a quick list of local stores you want to visit.

Now, instead of searching through four different files, you can just ask the Notebook: Based on the budget in the Excel sheet and the quote in the PDF, how much do we have left for the design ideas listed in the Word doc? The possibilities are endless here.

As much as I adore this tool, there are two things that baffle me about the current version. It is a OneNote feature, yet — and I still find this hard to believe — there is no direct way to add an existing OneNote page or an entire OneNote notebook as a source.

If I have years of history in a notebook, I’m forced to copy and paste that text into a Word doc or a manual note. It lacks support for Markdown files as well.

There is no way to drop a YouTube link into your sources and have Copilot read the transcript either. If the information is in a video, you are out of luck unless you find a text-based alternative.

Chat with your Notebook

Turn meeting notes into actionable plans

When I first started diving into Docker, I decided to build a Docker Learning Brain using a Copilot Notebook. I uploaded a few ‘cheat sheets’ and internal guides I found at work, a 100-page deep-dive white paper on Docker architecture, and some official documentation I had saved as PDFs.

Whenever I had an idea or a specific question during a tutorial, I would type it directly into a manual note. I even pasted in some confusing error messages I would run into while trying to run my first container.

I asked things like the following:

• Explain the difference between a Docker Image and a Container.
• Which Docker containers should I avoid?
• Suggest to me the top Docker containers for productivity.

One of the coolest features is the Audio overview. After a long day of staring at code, I don’t always want to read more text. I can hit the audio overview button, and Copilot synthesizes all those Word docs and PDFs in a spoken briefing. There are also a few options to customize the audio clip, which is a neat touch.

Summarize, synthesize, succeed

The biggest problem with the second brain is that we spend more time organizing our notes and documents than actually using them. OneNote has always been great at capturing the world around you, but with Copilot Notebooks, it’s finally gained the ability to help you understand it.

If you haven’t opened your notebooks in a while, give them a second look. If Copilot Notebooks feel underwhelming to you (due to some limitations), move your OneNote pages to Google’s NotebookLM to get the job done.