What is a Notebook?

A Notebook is a folder system that gives Copilot a separate brain for each of your projects.

Feed it information about a specific project, and it remembers that context for every chat. And this intelligence builds over time: the more you feed a Notebook, the more useful it gets.

Here's a preview on when to use it:

If you manage a project/program: set up one Notebook per active project. Don't set up a Notebook for every project you're working on. Copilot already has that context about you, and acts as your AI assistant overall.

If you're onboarding someone to a project: publish a page instead of writing a fresh explainer by hand.

How is a Notebook different from an AI agent?

It's easy to confuse this with an agent, so here's the distinction.

A Notebook is lightweight — it doesn't need instructions or parameters, it's just a knowledge base for that project.

Whereas an Agent needs parameters to go execute deep work. If you're running programs with a lot of moving context — stakeholders, decisions, history — a Notebook is the lower-effort starting point.

I run programs of 60+ people across 120 countries, and I'm always creating a Notebook for whatever I'm actively delivering.

It contains intelligence on that project that all my internal stakeholders can access. And it makes onboarding someone onto that project so much easier. (How I do that later).

How do I set up a Notebook?

Go to Copilot, open Notebooks, create a name for it, and feed it the documents relevant to that project.

Caution: Do not overload the Notebook with every piece of information available on this project. Stick to the most important, relevant files — like briefs, timelines, or strategy documents.

If you feed the Notebook an excessive amont of information, the AI will need more time and power to process it, perhaps delaying results.

What this looks like in a real workday:

• Name the Notebook after the program, not a generic label. For example, "Q4 Marketing Campaign," not "Client Notebook"

• Load in the documents you'd otherwise have to summarize verbally on every call

• Treat it the way you'd treat onboarding a new team member: what would they need to read first?

Turn Chats into Published Pages

Once a Notebook has context, Copilot can take your disorganized working chats inside it and turn them into polished, published pages, without you writing anything from scratch.

I use published pages most often when onboarding someone new onto a project, instead of writing up a fresh explainer, I ask Copilot to turn the relevant Notebook chats into one

Moving forward, a page becomes the reference doc you'd otherwise have to write and then keep updating by hand.

Caution: A published page is a snapshot of the chat that generated it. If the underlying project changes, the page doesn't update itself — you'll need to regenerate or edit it.

Share the Notebook with your Team

Give your team access to the project's Notebook, and they get the same accumulated context Copilot has been building, without you having to book a meeting to re-explain any of it.

Your own chats inside the Notebook stay private.

What's shared is the output: the pages, and the source material and context behind them.

Now, instead of people defaulting coming to you about a project, they can access the "project brain" for themselves first, then come to you for more technical or strategic questions.

Caution: Sharing the Notebook shares the context you fed it. Make sure you don't include anything sensitive. Treat what you load into a shared Notebook the way you'd treat a shared drive, not a private chat.