OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is the free-form note-taking app in the Microsoft 365 Office apps. It organises content into notebooks, sections, and pages, with no fixed structure beyond that — you can type, draw, paste images, embed files, and record audio anywhere on a page. OneNote runs on Windows, macOS, the web, iOS, and Android, syncing notebooks through OneDrive or SharePoint. Every Microsoft Teams team and every Microsoft 365 Group includes a OneNote notebook by default. Class Notebook and Staff Notebook variants are used in Microsoft 365 Education for distributing assignments and shared lesson content.

Worked example

A project team uses the OneNote notebook that Teams automatically provisions for every team as a running meeting log: each week gets its own page, action items are typed as checkboxes anyone can tick off, and a screenshot pasted straight from a whiteboard session sits next to the typed notes from that same meeting. Because the notebook syncs through the team's SharePoint site, anyone on the team can open it from the Teams tab, from the OneNote app, or from a browser, and see the same content updated in near real time — no one needs to be emailed a copy or told where the file lives.

Common pitfalls

Treating a OneNote notebook like a set of separate documents that need to be manually distributed is a common miss — the entire point of a notebook synced through Teams or SharePoint is that everyone with access already has the current version, no sharing step required. Letting a single notebook sprawl into an unstructured dump of every topic a team has ever discussed, with no sections or page hierarchy, makes it unsearchable in practice even though the content is technically all there — a light structure (one section per project, one page per meeting) keeps it usable. And assuming OneNote is the right place for content that needs formal version history, approvals, or retention policy — a contract, a policy document — is a mismatch: that's a Word-in-SharePoint job, not a notebook page.