You are starting a new project and the first thing you do is collect information: an email from the client, three PDFs on SharePoint, research articles from the web, your own notes in OneNote. After two days you reach the point where you are no longer sure what you have already read, which source led to which insight, and where the document with the summary actually lives.
I know this from practice, and I know the solution: Copilot Notebooks in Microsoft 365. The tool combines a notebook with AI assistance and your own M365 data. You add sources, ask questions, have documents generated, all in one place, without switching back and forth between five apps.
In this post I show you what Copilot Notebooks are, what the new 2026 features bring and how you can get started right away.
What are Copilot Notebooks and where do you find them?
Copilot Notebooks is a separate area inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, not to be confused with Microsoft OneNote or Microsoft Loop. It is an AI notebook that you fill with your own sources and that lets you ask targeted questions of those sources.
You find Copilot Notebooks directly in Copilot Chat (Microsoft 365): click «Notebooks» in the left sidebar. Alternatively you can reach them in the Copilot area of Microsoft365.com under the menu item of the same name.
There you see all of your existing notebooks, similar to OneNote, where you keep several notebooks for different projects or topics. 📓
Step 1: Create a new notebook and add sources
Click «New notebook» and give it a meaningful name, for example «Client project Mustermann AG» or «Market research AI tools 2026».
Now comes the decisive step: adding sources. Click «+ Sources» and choose what you want to analyse: 📎
- Files from SharePoint or OneDrive: PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints
- Outlook emails: Copilot can access relevant emails that you share with it
- Web pages: paste URLs directly
- Entire SharePoint folders or sites: this is new in 2026, you no longer have to add file by file, instead you can set an entire project folder on SharePoint as a reference. The notebook stays up to date automatically when files in the folder change. 🆕
With the new three-column layout (also 2026) you see your sources on the left, Copilot Pages in the middle and the chat area on the right at the same time. That way you keep the overview while you work with the content.
Step 2: Ask questions and get summaries
As soon as your sources are loaded, you can get going in the notebook's chat area. Ask Copilot direct questions that relate to your sources: 💬
- «Summarise the key points from the three contract documents.»
- «Which arguments for product A appear in the sales material?»
- «What was decided in the latest meeting notes?»
Copilot does not answer from the internet or from general knowledge, only from the sources you have assigned to the notebook. That is an essential difference compared with normal Copilot Chat: the answers are directly traceable, you immediately see which file a piece of information comes from.
Feel free to ask several follow-up questions. Copilot «remembers» the context within the notebook conversation, you do not have to explain what it is about every single time.
Step 3: Use Copilot Pages as structured notes
Everything Copilot answers you can save as a Copilot Page with one click. A page is a structured, editable page, similar to a Loop document.
That is handy when, for example, you have received a summary that you still want to extend or adjust. You click «Save as page», edit the content directly and link it to the notebook. 📄
Several pages add up to a structured knowledge pool for your project, with the advantage that all pages stay in the context of the notebook and can be worked on further with Copilot at any time.
Step 4: Generate documents and presentations straight from the notebook
This is where one of the biggest practical gains of 2026 lies: from inside a Copilot Notebook you can generate a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation directly.
Here is how it works: 🛠️
- In the notebook, click «Create» (or «Generate») at the top.
- Choose the output format: Word document, PowerPoint presentation, PDF or infographic.
- Give Copilot a short prompt, for example: «Create a report on the key insights from my research sources, with an executive summary and three main chapters.»
- Choose the level of detail you want and the design theme.
- Copilot generates the document based on your notebook content, not on external knowledge.
The result is not an empty AI document, it is a substantively grounded document based on your own material. You save yourself the manual gathering and structuring. 🎯
Step 5: Mind maps for connections at a glance
Also new in 2026 are mind maps inside Copilot Notebooks. You find them in the notebook menu under «Views» or «Visualize».
Copilot analyses the key topics from your sources and builds an interactive mind map that shows how the topics relate to each other. You can click nodes, go into depth and ask Copilot to deliver more information on a particular branch. 🗺️
This is especially helpful in the early project phase, when you have many sources and no clear picture yet of what belongs together.
Practical tip: the notebook as the starting point of a project
When I start a new client project, the first thing I do is create a Copilot Notebook and attach all the relevant material to it: the tender documents, existing contracts, internal notes from the first meeting, relevant emails.
Then I ask Copilot a simple opening question: «What are the most important requirements and open questions in these documents?» The answer gives me a structured overview straight away, and I see immediately where the gaps still are, before I begin the actual work. 💡
That does not replace reading all the material critically, but it gives me a solid starting position in a few minutes instead of hours.
Conclusion & call to action
Copilot Notebooks is one of the most useful tools in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and at the same time one of the most underrated. Anyone who works a lot with projects, research or large volumes of documents gains considerably in structure and speed.
Try it now: create a notebook for your current project, add three to five sources and ask Copilot your first question. You will notice how much faster you get an overview. 🚀
Have you tried Copilot Notebooks already? Write to me, I am curious how you use it in your own practice.
