Share notebooks in OneNote

- [Narrator] OneNote is a tool for keeping a notebook on your computer. It's one of those desktop applications that you can download and install like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. But OneNote is also a web-based service that you can access on the Office 365 Website. And those two things can link together in really useful ways, so I want to start by opening up the OneNote application on my computer. So I'm going to go to the start menu and launch One Note. And here I have one notebook. I don't have a lot of content here, but I can make notebooks consisting of text, pictures, hand written or hand drawn content, lots of stuff.

I'll leave it to the Essential Training Course to help you explore that. But what I'd like to focus on here is where this notebook is stored. Up near the top left corner I can see the name of this notebook file and this is actually a menu. If I click on that to open it up, I can see a list of all of the notebooks that I have open. I only have one notebook right now, so there's only one on this list. But if I point at the name of that notebook, I can see the path to where this notebook is stored. This notebook is on my OneDrive.

So here's a quick important note, if you sign into Office 365 and then install the desktop applications so that the first time you launch the OneNote application you're already signed into Office, then it will launch with one notebook stored on your OneDrive, the way I have it now. Now let's jump over to the Office 365 website to see something, so I'm going to close the OneDrive application, go over to the website and I want to access OneNote from here, which I can do by clicking on the OneNote tile.

So when I open OneNote on the web, it automatically opens that same notebook. I can see the same file name up here at the top, and if I go to this little menu here and switch to the same page, then I'll see the same notes that we saw over on the desktop application. So if I have a notebook on OneDrive or on Sharepoint, I can access it in both the desktop application and the web based version. But how did it know to open the same notebook? Well that happened because I only have one notebook file right now, as a matter of fact, if we jump back to the Office webpage and take a quick look at my OneDrive, of course I can see that one note file is stored here on my OneDrive.

And I only have this one notebook file. I don't have any other OneNote documents on my computer or on OneDrive or on Sharepoint. That's why it opens by default in both versions of OneNote. Now I can certainly make new notebooks, and if I do that I can choose to store it on OneDrive, which means I can access it on multiple computers, and I can share it with others, I can save it on one of my Sharepoint groups, and then other people in those groups could access it, or I could store it locally on my computer, then only I could access it.

So let's make another notebook. Now if we go back to the OneDrive app on the web, and I go into the file menu, you'll see there is no option to create a new notebook from here. But here's what I can do: for now I'm going to close OneNote on the web, and I want to open up the desktop application again, so I'm going to go back to my start menu, open up the desktop application and from here, I can make a new notebook. So I can go to the file menu, I can go to new, and of course I could choose to store this new notebook on OneDrive, Sharepoint or locally on my computer.

I want to save this one on OneDrive, so I'm going to select OneDrive, then I'll hit browse, and I'll just leave this in the root directory of my OneDrive. And I'm going to give this a name, I'm going to call it work notes, and I usually do not do this, but I'm going to add a little bit extra here that's going to help us identify these later, so I'm going to add created in desktop application. So I'll hit create, and as soon as I create a new notebook on my OneDrive, it asks me if I want to share it. I could share it now, or I could do that later.

And the sharing tools work very similarly to sharing other files which we saw earlier in this chapter. If I wanted to share it now, I could just hit this option to invite people, but I don't want to do that, I just want to see this notebook, so I'll hit not now. And now I can see my new notebook here. And I can open up this menu, and I can see that it's listed along with that other notebook that we had earlier. So let's just add a little bit to this notebook, I'll type in some text here as a title for this page, then I'll add a little text box here, and I'm just going to stop there because we're not really worried about filling in content, we're talking about where these files are saved.

So that's just one way to make a new notebook. Let's close this, I'm just going to quit the desktop application, go back to the Office 365 website and I want to see another way to make a new notebook is to start on my OneDrive or a Sharepoint group. So let's go to my OneDrive, and I'm going to go up here to at the top to where it says new. And I'm going to choose OneNote notebook. So I'm creating a new OneNote notebook from here and I'll call this one project notes, add a little bit extra here, just so we can identify it later, and I'll hit create.

So now that file is on my OneDrive and it immediately opens it in OneNote on the web. But for now, I just want to close that. And what I'd like to do is go back to my OneDrive again and I want you to see that we can open one of these notebooks directly from OneDrive, or Sharepoint if I was over there. I could just click on one of these, and it opens up inside of OneNote on the web. And as you might expect, I could share these files from here and multiple people can open the same OneNote notebook and edit them at the same time.

So co-authoring works in OneNote as well. Okay so I've made two new notebooks, so I have a total of three. I made one in the desktop application, and I made one directly on my OneDrive. I could also do this directly from a Sharepoint document library, but I'm not going to do that, it works the same as what we just saw. So now, I want to go back to OneNote on the web, so back on the Office 365 web page, opening up OneNote from this tile. Now that I do have multiple notebooks on OneDrive, when I launch the OneNote app on the web, it prompts me to choose which notebook I want to open.

So there's this recent list, and there's a My Notebooks list. My Notebooks shows me a list of all of the notebooks I have on my OneDrive. It does not however, include notebooks that are saved in Sharepoint groups, and clearly it doesn't show me files that are stored locally on my computer. But I can always open notebooks from the document library in the Sharepoint groups if I want. Or I can go to the recents list and open one of my recent notebooks, even if it is stored on Sharepoint. So from here I could choose which one of these I want to open, so I'm going to choose this one.

It opens up, and I can continue working on this notebook. I could even go to the desktop application and open any of these notebooks from Sharepoint or OneDrive as well. So if you think about it, this system is not too far off from what you could do with Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents, you can save them or create them on Sharepoint or OneDrive. You can open them on the web, or in the desktop application. And you can share or co-author them with your coworkers. Be sure to check out OneNote 2016 Essential Training to learn more about working with your notebooks.