Share notebooks in OneNote 2010
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by OneNote in Help Articles
In Microsoft OneNote 2010 Beta, you can share any notebook so that you can access it on other computers or on the Web, or so that you can work in it together with other people. As a collaborative tool, OneNote offers far more than the ability to send static notebook pages via e-mail. Depending on the nature of your projects, you can use OneNote to brainstorm together with other people in meetings, use the notebook pages as a virtual whiteboard, and set up shared notebooks in which everyone can view, add, and edit information.
Unlike other programs that lock files for editing by one person at a time, OneNote 2010 lets multiple authors access a shared notebook at the same time. Anytime someone edits to the pages and sections in the shared notebook, OneNote automatically synchronizes the changes so that the notebook is always up-to-date for everyone. OneNote also maintains a separate offline copy of the notes on each user’s computer. That way, shared note-taking participants can continue to edit the notes locally even when they are temporarily disconnected from the network. The next time they connect to the shared notebook, OneNote automatically merges their changes with the changes made by everyone else.
Create a new shared notebook
- On the File menu, click New.
- Under Store Notebook On, choose where the new notebook should be stored:
Click Web if you want to be able to use the notebook from any computer or from a Web browser. You will need to sign in or sign up for an account, after which you can control whether your notebook can be accessed only by you or also by other people.
Click Network if you want to share the new notebook with other people on the same computer network or on a SharePoint site (for example, at your work or at your school).
- In the Name box, enter a descriptive title for the subject of the new notebook (for example, Team Notebook).
- In the Web Location or Network Location field, do one of the following:
Specify a Web Location If the Web service is available, sign in with an existing account (such as Windows Live) or sign up for a new one. When you are signed in, you will see a list of your Web folders where you can create shared notebooks. If you don’t need to share with other people, select one of the Personal Folders. If you do need to share with others, select a Shared Folder to which others will have access. To set sharing permissions for new and existing folders, OneNote will launch your Web browser, where you can finish creating the new folder for your notebook. Return to OneNote and then refresh the folder list in the Web Location field to see the folder that you just created. Now select this folder and then proceed to Step 5 below.
Specify a Network Location You can enter the full path of a network file share, enter a mapped network drive, or paste the full address of a SharePoint document library where you want to create the shared notebook. You can also select from one of the recent SharePoint locations, if available. Note that the notebook will be accessible to anybody who has permissions to this network location or SharePoint site.
- Click Create Notebook.
Share an existing notebook
- On the File menu, click Share.
- Under Select Notebook, select an existing notebook that you want to share with other people or between other computers that you will be using.
- Under Share On, choose where the notebook should be shared:Click Web if you want to be able to use the notebook from any computer or from a Web browser. You will need to sign in or sign up for an account, after which you can control whether your notebook can be accessed only by you or also by other people.
Click Network if you want to share the new notebook with other people on the same computer network or on a SharePoint site (for example, at your work or at your school).
- In the Web Location or Network Location field, do one of the following:
Specify a Web Location If the Web service is available, sign in with an existing account (such as Windows Live) or sign up for a new one. When you are signed in, you will see a list of your Web folders where you can create shared notebooks. If you don’t need to share with other people, select one of the Personal Folders. If you do need to share with others, select a Shared Folder to which others will have access. To set sharing permissions for new and existing folders, OneNote will launch your Web browser, where you can finish creating the new folder for your notebook. Return to OneNote and then refresh the folder list in the Web Location field to see the folder that you just created. Now select this folder and then proceed to Step 5 below.
Specify a Network Location You can enter the full path of a network file share, enter a mapped network drive, or paste the full address of a SharePoint document library where you want to create the shared notebook. You can also select from one of the recent SharePoint locations, if available. Note that the notebook will be accessible to anybody who has permissions to this network location or SharePoint site.
- Click Share Notebook.
Note: If a Web or Network location that you want to use is shown as unavailable, make sure you are connected to the Internet or your network and that you have the necessary permissions before attempting to save and use notebooks in such locations.
Create an e-mail message with a link to the shared notebook for yourself or others
After you create or share a notebook, OneNote will ask you if you want to create an e-mail message with a link to the shared notebook.
If you are sharing the notebook with other people, click E-mail a Link to compose the e-mail message for your recipients. This message will include a link to the shared notebook, which recipients can click to open the shared notebook on their computer.
Note: Mail recipients who do not already have permission to access the shared notebook location will not be able to use the shared notebook. The e-mail link only points to the location; it does not provide automatic access.
If you won’t be sharing your notebook with others but you want to use it on multiple computers, you can click E-mail a Link and then send the e-mail message with the link to your own Web-based e-mail account. This way, you can easily open the shared notebook from another computer.
Sudhanshu
31. Aug, 2010
How to “DESHARE” a notebook??
Please help.
John
18. Aug, 2010
Repeat question that wasn’t answered: Is there a way to lock a paragraph so it cannot be edited (without unlocking it)?
I want to share a notebook with the field but i don’t want them to be able to alter some (or all) of the pages.
Mark
03. Aug, 2010
I am using OneNote 2010 and am sharing with around 50 of my collegues using skydrive. I see that I can make some section password protected and I can give permissions for some ppl using skydrive to make them read only. Now what if I want some sections or pages to be read only. Can you make levels such as owner level who have full access (that will be the email of who created the book), co-owner who have same right excluding deleting the book, users who can have different access level to different pages and section and group sections. Imagine a professor and students where he shares certain pages of his lecture where no one can change while other pages for quizzes and comments can be created, changed and deleted. My last suggestion is to make an option for the owner and co-owner to chose the names and initials of the participants of that shared book. This will make our professor in our example know who is doing what, without giving them the chance on faking each others.
Lexus Yuen
23. Jun, 2010
I wonder whether there are size limits for the notebooks shared via SkyDrive.
Bujar
20. Jun, 2010
Anyone who wants to use the same notebook on many pc-s, just use Dropbox and copy your notebooks into the Dropbox folder. Works perfectly!
Don
18. Jun, 2010
I use this at work to share course structure with other instructors. This open editing is nice but not needed and in actual fact a hinderance in our operation. We do not want the less experienced computer users to accidently delete pages of important data. We have specific people that update the onenote notebooks for the different courses for use by all.
We need the notebooks to be a read-only for all users with specific users to have full edit rights. I have not seen this feature in 2010 although I was counting on it for a long time and may be missing where to set such things. Any help would be beneficial on this. Thanks!
Paul
14. Jun, 2010
With regard to the password for synching to a sharepoint site i think onenote now uses the windows logon credentials for the currently logged on user.
http://office-blog.net/post/Office-2010-Changes-in-SharePoint-Workspace-2010.aspx
Emily
01. Jun, 2010
Any clue where in OneNote 2010 one put the password to synch with a shared notebook on a SharePoint site? Thanks.
Josh
25. May, 2010
What is the status of sharing notebooks via the web? we’ve been RTM for some time with no word anywhere on this one feature, which, if I recal correctly was the flagship feature of the entire suite.
Scott
25. May, 2010
Any clue where in OneNote 2010 one put the password to synch with a shared notebook on a SharePoint site? Thanks.
Arif
18. May, 2010
I am using the final release version of One Note 2010 and the Web Locaion still says “This service is currently not available.” Any word on when we will get this… this feature with skydrive is working on Word 2010. I think this will be a great use of skydrive 25 gb space.
Jan
25. Apr, 2010
Hi. Is the Share on Windows Live (SkyDrive) working now in the RTM version?
Amber
07. Apr, 2010
How do I change my default email for sending my OneNote pages? It would be very helpful for me to send my notes I take from class to other classmates through student email.
I have searched everywhere for an option, but I still seem to be missing it.
Troy
16. Mar, 2010
Can OneNote 2010 share with Office Live Workspace?
Cindy K.
01. Mar, 2010
Will OneNote 2010 be using Windows Live Sync to handle sharing of notebooks in the “cloud”? I have created a sync’d folder in my Live Sync that is my OneNote folder. Will there be a way that OneNote 2010 sets this up automatically for us? Is this different than SkyDrive?
Thanks
Michael
19. Feb, 2010
I’m opening some notebooks that reside on my desktop computer from my laptop as a way to keep everything tidily synced. When I made a new notebook on the desktop it works fine; however, when I try to open older notebooks on the desktop that I converted to 2010 format from 2007 format, all the sections are read-only (regardless of whether the notebook is active, inactive, or closed on the desktop. I’m sharing via Homegroup in Win 7 (32-bit).
Ray
17. Feb, 2010
Is there a way to make a notebook ‘read only’ for some users?
thanks
CSteinberg
16. Feb, 2010
I have remained very surprised that there has not yet been the ability to add notification options to Shared Notebooks. This is a very limiting feature for enterprise use. Users to not want to have to continually check various locations for updates. Being that many users use their inbox as an aggregator of information, this would be a natural fit. Is it at all possible to find out if this will be added, as what an approximate time frame would be for implementation. To be honest, the lack of this feature is a significant limiter that will prevent us from moving forward with it. Thanks.
Gydeon
08. Feb, 2010
I am trying to email from “OneNote 2010 Beta”, but I continue to receive an error message
“OneNote cannot send the email. This could be caused by a network connection problem, an incorrectly configured default email program, or Office installation problem.”
What does this mean? How do I set “OneNote 2010 Beta” to recognize “Windows Live Mail” as my default email program. I cannot use “Outlook” since I am utilizing “Hotmail” for my emailing. Looking through the “Options” tab I do not clearly see an area to configure an email program.
Jeff
05. May, 2010
did you ever find out how to do this?
Kurt Fairfield
05. Feb, 2010
I have shared a notebook on my Desktop machine on a USB drive on the desktop. My Laptop can access this shared notebook, however, the notebook is always listed as read only and seems to be caught in a perpetual sync although it has been listed as in sync, it quickly moves to syncing all without ever allowing me to enter information on the read only Laptop session.
WillieNY
25. Jan, 2010
You have great blog and this post is good!
—
best regards, Greg
Jordan
17. Jan, 2010
Could you please describe, in detail, the following two things:
1. How do I take a calendar I have in outlook, and turn it into a shared calendar on groove?
2. How do I do the same for a onenote notebook?
Don
15. Jan, 2010
How do you use a sharepoint site for syncing without having to require that the document be checked out first?
Steve Lindell
11. Jan, 2010
This is without a doubt a phenomenal feature. Is there a way to lock a paragraph so it cannot be edited (without unlocking it)?
Keith
10. Jan, 2010
I would like to use OneNote as part of a distance collaboration environment. We’ve tested OneNote2007 and one issue we encountered was with the update latency. Does or will the 2010 version provide any ability to push changes to remote collaborators more quickly?
thanks, its a great product
Russ
26. Jan, 2010
I’m looking at a very similar application. OneNote 2007 had the live sharing sessions which allowed this to work. This feature was removed in ON2010 and I’ve been experimenting with the synchronization and I’m pretty disappointed. The Live sharing seemed to decrease the sync interval time, where as now I see updates taking between 6 & 30 seconds to update across a shared network drive. Am I missing something?
Kevin Yang
29. Mar, 2010
i totally agree! whoever decided to remove this ‘live sharing session’ feature is the most stupid one i ever seen! the replacement of using a share notebook sucks, it requires people find a common share folder themselves, which is always not available.
Brian
10. Jan, 2010
Is there a way to turn off the highlighting of changes? Thanks!
Stephen
04. Jan, 2010
This is a great feature. I’m able to use this via a network drive to work on notes from any computer. Nice.
Here’s my problem, ever since I started sharing my notebooks I have started to get duplicates of any section I am working on. The duplicate sections appear in the notebook with the title of my section + what appears to be a GUID code. What’s up?
Note that when I say “network drive”, I’m actually using the most excellent JungleDisk to show my notebooks stored on Amazon Storage (S3) as a network drive (until SkyDrive is integrated of course!!)
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
09. Jan, 2010
Stephen, thank you for your feedback. I have not heard of any issues with your JungleDisk/Amazon S3 scenario, but I’ll pass this on in case there are any known issues. Thanks for posting this info (and for the positive comments as well, they’re always much appreciated)!
Lynn
08. Feb, 2010
Stephen I had the same issue when I tried to put a shared notebook on JungleDisk with OneNote 2007. I’ll try again with 2010 and see what happens…
Jim Hanna
03. Jan, 2010
Can notebooks be shared between a Onenote 2007 instance and a Onenote 2010 instance? I keep getting a “cannot access….” network error, though I’ve checked the sharing setup on both machines. Thanks.
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
09. Jan, 2010
Hi Jim, yes — you should be able to share a OneNote 2007 notebook between a computer using OneNote 2007 and a computer using OneNote 2010 Beta. Are you doing a normal notebook folder share on your network or are you using any other sort of connection management software in-between?
Michael
20. May, 2010
We are having accessing a shared notebook that was created in OneNote 2007 with users who have 2010 installed. We get the “OneNote could not access the specified location”, which is a SharePoint site that has no user permissions set and the 2010 users can browse to the sharepoint location perfectly, but cannot build the 2007 OneNote shared notebook. 2007 users can access the syncable OneNote perfectly, but not 2010 OneNote users. Please help!
Roman
14. Dec, 2009
it’s nice that onnote finally highlights changes on shared notebooks, and even tags with initials who changed it.
two questions:
1. is there any way to define something different to be used to tag who made changes, like userid?
2. is there any way to subscribe to a shared notebook, so you get some sort of notification when changes are made, like an rss feed?
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
09. Jan, 2010
Hi Roman, thanks for your feedback. Here are a couple of answers to your questions:
1. You can define the username and initials of each of your notebook authors by having them go into File > Options and changing the fields under “Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office.” This is what OneNote uses to identify multiple authors in a shared notebook.
2. This is not yet possible, but it’s a great idea! Thank you for suggesting it. I’ve passed it on to our development team.
Joe
08. Dec, 2009
When will the share option in Skydive get added to Office 2010 Beta,
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
17. Dec, 2009
Hi Joe, please see the Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.
Hareesh
06. Dec, 2009
Hi,
Is it possible to unshare a notebook after sharing?
Thanks,
Hareesh
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
17. Dec, 2009
You can stop sharing a notebook by simply moving its folder from a shared network or Internet location to another (or deleting it). If the shared notebook is in a file share on your hard drive, you can revoke the access rights that you previously granted for that file share. Before moving or deleting content that others may rely on, be sure you make and keep a backup copy of the entire notebook.
scoobie
26. Nov, 2009
What if you want to share notebooks between two home pcs – what’s the best way to do this? Network? How?
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
23. Nov, 2009
David, unfortunately this much anticipated feature hasn’t made it into the Beta yet. Check out the FAQ page for more info: http://www.onenotehelp.com/2009/11/19/frequently-asked-questions/
David Schroeder
22. Nov, 2009
When trying to share a notebook over Web (using SkyDrive) I get the message “We are sorry. This service is currently not available” Checking the SkyDrive site seems to indicate it is online, so I’m unsure where this problem lies.