Brainstorm Ideas with Copilot in OneNote

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About this lesson

Use Copilot in a OneNote notebook to brainstorm ideas and create to-do lists. 

Quick reference

Brainstorm Ideas with Copilot in OneNote

Brainstorm ideas, summarize content, and create to-do lists with Copilot in OneNote. 

When to use

We use Copilot in OneNote whenever we are looking for inspiration for our notes pages. 

Instructions

We can use Copilot in OneNote to help us generate ideas, create to-do list, gather information, and draft plans. 

Give me Ideas

In this example, we are going on an adults only, 5-day trip to Greece. We would like Copilot to draft an itinerary based on our criteria. 

  • Type the prompt: 'Create an itinerary for an adults only trip to Greece. We will be going for 5 days. We like arts, culture and food'. 
  • Press Enter. 

We can copy and paste the itinerary into a OneNote page in a floating placeholder that can be moved around. 

Create a List

Copilot can create to-do lists and other types of lists. 

In this example, we want Copilot to create a pre-travel checklist. 

  • Type the prompt: 'Create me a travel checklist'. 
  • Press Enter. 

To turn a list of bullet points into checkboxes:

  • Select the list. 
  • From the mini-toolbar, select bullets to remove them. 
  • From the mini-toolbar, select checkboxes. 

Hints & tips

  • You can ask Copilot to create a list with checkboxes and it will create it in the Copilot pane. However, when we paste it into the page, it will display as bullet points. 
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  • 00:04 OneNote is a really popular note taking application available in Microsoft 365,
  • 00:10 and it's one of the applications that Copilot is integrated into.
  • 00:15 Now, I will say, out of all of the applications,
  • 00:17 I find this one the most limited.
  • 00:19 There's not a ton of things we can do, but let's take a look at some of them.
  • 00:24 Now the first thing you'll notice is on the home tab, we have a Copilot icon.
  • 00:28 And the way that OneNote works is that we create workbooks, you can see here I've
  • 00:32 created one called Holiday Plan, and within each notebook we have pages.
  • 00:36 And I'm currently on the page called Greece 2024 which is
  • 00:40 in the section Our Trip.
  • 00:42 Now if we click on Copilot, what I want to do is I want Copilot to create me
  • 00:47 an itinerary because we're going on an adults only trip to Greece in 2024 and
  • 00:52 we have very specific likes.
  • 00:55 Now we're going for five days.
  • 00:56 So I want to include all of this information in my prompt.
  • 01:00 And you'll notice if we click view prompts, again it's going to take us into
  • 01:04 the Copilot lab, so we get more suggestions for prompts.
  • 01:07 So you could choose any of these in here.
  • 01:10 Now because I know the prompt that I want to use, I'm not going to use these.
  • 01:14 So let's close this down.
  • 01:16 And let's just type in our prompt to build an itinerary.
  • 01:20 So I'm going to say, create an itinerary for an adults only trip to Greece.
  • 01:25 We'll be going for 5 days, and then I'm going to give Copilot an idea as to
  • 01:30 what we're interested in, what we might want to see and do.
  • 01:34 So we like arts, culture, and food.
  • 01:37 So anything that Copilots suggests should meet those specifications.
  • 01:41 Let's send the prompt through and see what it comes up with.
  • 01:44 And here we go, it's starting to build an itinerary.
  • 01:47 So we'll just wait for
  • 01:49 it to finish up because remember it is a five day itinerary.
  • 01:52 And once we have it there, I'm going to click on the copy button and
  • 01:56 then I'm just going to paste it onto my page.
  • 01:59 Now you can do Ctrl+V, I'm just going to to do keep source formatting.
  • 02:04 And then we have our five day plan.
  • 02:05 So I can see we've got a couple of days in Athens looking at all the cultural sites.
  • 02:10 We're then going to Delphi and then a final couple of days in Santorini.
  • 02:15 So that looks pretty good to me.
  • 02:17 Now let's go underneath here and
  • 02:19 I'm going to use Copilot to create me a pre-travel checklist.
  • 02:24 So all the things that I need to remember to do before we go away.
  • 02:28 Let's send it through and off it goes.
  • 02:31 Now you can see it's giving me a bullet pointed list.
  • 02:33 So I'm going to copy that and again I'm just going to paste it onto my page.
  • 02:38 Now what I would prefer here is for the bullet points to actually be check boxes.
  • 02:43 So I can check things off as I complete them.
  • 02:46 Now, so far, I haven't been able to get Copilot to do this for me, so
  • 02:49 I'm just going to switch these out manually.
  • 02:51 I'm going to use the mini toolbar to remove the bullet points and
  • 02:55 apply check boxes instead.
  • 02:57 And I think that looks pretty good.
  • 02:59 Now, the final thing I think I'm going to do is just going to send through a prompt,
  • 03:02 what are the top attractions in Athens?
  • 03:04 So this is going to be really useful when I'm planning the first two days.
  • 03:08 And you can see there's that information.
  • 03:10 Now in terms of Copilot in OneNote, there isn't a great deal else that you can do.
  • 03:15 You can either get it to give you ideas or draft a plan and
  • 03:18 drafting a plan is pretty much what we did there by creating the itinerary.
  • 03:23 So I think this has slightly less functionality than some of the other
  • 03:27 applications but it can still be incredibly useful.

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