Copilot Notebooks Guide

Copilot Notebooks is Microsoft's AI-powered knowledge workspace in Microsoft 365 Copilot. You collect curated content (files, meeting notes, emails, OneNote pages, SharePoint sites, Copilot Pages) and let Copilot use only this curated collection as its grounding source. Unlike regular Copilot Chat, which can access your entire OneDrive, Outlook, Teams, and the web, a notebook is scoped: Copilot answers only from the sources you have explicitly added.

A notebook bundles three things in a side-by-side view: References (curated sources), Chat (Q&A over the sources, persistent), and Created Content (generated outputs such as Pages, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Audio Overview, Mind Map, Study Guide, infographic).

Name change in September 2026: The canonical support documentation is no longer called “Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks” but Microsoft Copilot Notebooks. All the core pages have been renamed (Get started, How it works, Add references, Share, FAQ), and the licensing wording moved with them: Microsoft now writes “a Microsoft Copilot or Copilot Chat license is required”. The background is the merger of the two apps, Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot, into a single Copilot app, whose worldwide rollout for Windows and Mac began in mid-September 2026. Nothing about the product changes, but training material and search terms do: screenshots with the old wordmark go stale, and anyone searching internally for the old name lands on redirects.

Disambiguation: What Notebooks Are NOT

Microsoft has several AI workspaces that are easy to confuse. Here we are talking exclusively about Microsoft Copilot Notebooks (called “Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks” until September 2026). Common mix-ups:

• “Notebooks in Copilot” / “Notebooks in Copilot Chat”: earlier name from 2024 and early 2025, identical feature.
• Copilot Pages: a different feature, a collaborative canvas for co-editing straight out of chat responses. Also available without an M365 Copilot license (free tier).
• OneNote Notebooks: the classic note-taking product, not the same thing (but it can be added as a source to a Copilot Notebook).
• Microsoft Loop: a flexible live workspace with components, not the same thing.

Loop, Pages, and Notebooks technically share the same SharePoint Embedded container per user, but they are separate products conceptually and in licensing terms.

License

• Required: Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on license (approx. 30 USD per user per month).
• Also needed: a SharePoint or OneDrive license (service plan) on the account; otherwise the underlying SharePoint Embedded container cannot be created.
• Consumer: Also available in Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro, but not with the full feature set. The restrictions now sit in two different documents and they do not match. The Share doc names notebook sharing as unavailable, and explicitly for Pro as well, which has been on that exception list since September 2026. The FAQ separately names Capture (multimodal capture) and Mind Maps, but only for Personal, Family and Premium, and no longer lists sharing at all. The redesigned Notebooks experience of the Copilot app has not reached the consumer side either. For training this still means: what people practiced at home does not transfer 1:1 to the company tenant, and for consumer questions it pays to check both sources rather than only one.
• No free tier: Without an M365 Copilot license you only see “Web” mode and cannot create notebooks.

Feature Timeline (Selection)

• May 2025: First presentation of “Notebooks in Copilot” at Microsoft Build.
• Summer/Fall 2025: GA for commercial tenants. OneNote integration in preview.
• Q4 2025: Audio Overview feature (“podcast style”) live for Notebooks.
• March 2026 (from March 23): Frontier public preview for seven new capabilities (chat/page interactivity, Study Guide, SharePoint sites/folders as sources, Word agent, PowerPoint agent, M365 group sharing, Mind Maps).
• April 2026: GA for SharePoint site/folder grounding (early April), chat/page interactivity (mid-April), M365 group sharing (April), Study Guide (late April).
• May 2026: GA for Mind Maps (early May), PowerPoint agent (May), Word agent (May). Default on, no admin action needed.
• May 2026 (late May rolling GA): External web URLs as references (Roadmap ID 516040 / MC1193414); worldwide rollout currently in progress.
• May/June 2026: Frontier public from mid-May, worldwide GA rollout in June: Excel agent (spreadsheet generation), Teams meetings as references, infographics (Visual Overview, MC1317195).
• June 2026: New Copilot Notebooks UI in the M365 Copilot app (chats, Created Content and References bundled per project) plus OneNote sync: the same notebook in the M365 Copilot app and in OneNote, multimodal capture (image, voice, text) in OneNote.
• June 2026 (from June 11): Copilot Notebooks rolls out to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users (Commercial and Education); previously only for fully licensed M365 Copilot users. Dedicated “Notebooks” tab in the Copilot Chat app (browser and Teams-integrated). Phased rollout over roughly four weeks, default on (admin-controllable). Currently English only, more languages announced for later in 2026.
• July 2026 (from July 1, GA wave): OneNote integration reaches GA on Web (onenote.cloud.microsoft) and iOS (iPhone/iPad); previously Windows only. New: mobile multimodal capture (audio transcription, photo and typed notes in one session, also offline in meetings/whiteboard sessions) GA on iPhone; Copilot turns it into a structured Copilot Page in the notebook; more platforms to follow. At the same time, Microsoft formalizes the “Quick create” outputs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Mind Map) as GA on Windows and Web.
• July 2026 (from mid-July): Markdown files (.md) as a grounding source (MC1423103). Microsoft tightened the date on July 20, 2026: GA start late July, worldwide completion early August 2026 (previously announced as mid to late July), default on with no admin action. Technical documentation, README files, runbooks and wikis can thus be added as references without conversion. Also early to mid-July: text and RTF files (.txt, .rtf) as references (MC1420894), default on; unstructured plain text such as transcripts, meeting exports and developer notes becomes directly usable. Announced at the same time: Copilot Notebook in OneNote for Mac (Roadmap ID 565863), whose rollout was later pushed to late August 2026 (see below), and multimodal capture for OneNote on Windows (MC1405506, Roadmap ID 566322), whose date has since been moved as well, to late September through mid-October 2026 (see the September entry below).
• July 2026 (from July 29): Overview redesign in Copilot Notebooks on Windows, Mac and Web (Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes of July 29, 2026). The Overview view of a notebook shows the AI summary and key insights in a new layout and surfaces the matching artifacts that can be generated from the notebook with a single click. Copilot actively suggests what would make sense (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Mind Map) instead of waiting for a prompt.
• September/October 2026 (GA wave, from late September): The redesigned Notebooks experience in the M365 Copilot app (MC1420901, Roadmap ID 566318): chats, Created Content and References bundled per project, bidirectional OneNote sync. Microsoft has moved the date twice (06.08. and 14.09.2026): the worldwide rollout starts in late September (originally late August) and is expected to finish by early October 2026. The release notes of 23.09.2026 already list the new design for Web. On by default, no admin action required; licensed M365 Copilot users see the Notebooks area automatically. Existing notebooks, OneNote notebooks and entry points stay unchanged.
• August 2026 (from August 11): The Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes list the Overview redesign for Windows, Mac and Web again; the wave that started in late July is now broadly rolled out, no longer merely announced.
• August 2026 (from August 25): The Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes of August 25, 2026 list a revised Notebooks interface (Roadmap ID 516042): simplified navigation and a continuous flow when opening notebook content. This is a second UX wave after the Overview redesign, this time for the navigation itself rather than the Overview page. The same release notes list Outlook emails (Roadmap ID 564910) and Teams meetings (Roadmap ID 560706) as references again; both are therefore broadly rolled out and no longer merely announced.
• August 2026 (from late August): Copilot Notebook in OneNote for Mac enters rollout (MC1409042, Roadmap ID 565863). Microsoft names late August to early September 2026 as the window, later than the original July announcement. An M365 Copilot license is required, the feature is default on and, according to the Message Center, comes for Mac without an admin switch to turn it off.
• August 2026 (announced): The same redesigned Notebooks interface comes to Android in the M365 Copilot app (Roadmap ID 566704, GA target August 2026, Worldwide Standard Multi-Tenant). This makes the notebook the container for ongoing work on mobile too: related chats, Created Content and References in one persistent workspace whose context grounds Copilot responses across sessions.
• September 2026 (mid to late September): Multimodal capture on Android reaches GA (MC1450130, Roadmap ID 567895; preview since mid-August). Audio, photos and typed notes in one session, followed by a structured Copilot Page in the notebook, just like on the iPhone. Requirements: M365 Copilot license plus a SharePoint or OneDrive license. Default on, can be turned off via the new cloud policy “Capture in Copilot Notebooks for mobile devices”. Mobile capture has thus arrived on both major phone platforms.
• September 2026 (GA): Power BI reports as references (Roadmap ID 569928, preview in August). For the first time, report level rather than file level enters the notebook: Copilot grounds summaries, decks and briefings on the report data. Desktop and Web, premium source.
• September 2026 (preview): CSV/TSV and image files as references (Roadmap IDs 569210 and 569211, both added to the roadmap on August 12, 2026). Preview in September, GA target October 2026. CSV/TSV brings structured tables into the notebook without anyone having to convert them into an .xlsx first; JPG/PNG makes image content (text, diagrams, charts) usable as grounding context. Both Worldwide Standard Multi-Tenant, CSV/TSV additionally on the Windows desktop. Together with Power BI, this is the third expansion of the source corpus within a single quarter.
• September 2026 (correction): On September 2, 2026 Microsoft moved the date for multimodal capture on Windows (MC1405506): GA is now late September to mid-October 2026 instead of late July to mid-September. Anyone who had already planned the feature into Windows training sessions pushes it back by about a month; Android arrives first.
• September 2026 (from 10.09.): The redesigned Notebooks interface reaches the government clouds (roadmap ID 569203, GCC, GCC High and DoD, GA target September 2026). Content-wise it is the same experience as in the commercial tenant: chats, created content and references bundled in one persistent workspace. For regulated customers this is the first date from which Notebooks becomes plannable at all. The same roadmap description also names the two surfaces clearly for the first time: the lightweight Notebooks view in the Copilot app and the workspace view in OneNote.
• September 2026 (mid-September): Microsoft renames the product in the documentation from “Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks” to Microsoft Copilot Notebooks, in parallel with the merger of the Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps into a single Copilot app (worldwide rollout for Windows and Mac from mid-September). At the same time Microsoft updates the admin documentation on the container lifecycle: a user-owned container can be permanently transferred to a new person when someone leaves (see chapter 9).
• September 2026 (from 23.09.): In the Copilot app you can now add content as References to a notebook straight from the Quick Access section in Search: context menu → “Add to” → “Notebook” (release notes of 23.09.2026, Web). The same release notes list Outlook emails (Windows, Web) and Teams meetings (Android, Windows, iOS, Web) as References again.

What Is a Notebook Conceptually?

A notebook is analogous to a ChatGPT project or a Google NotebookLM notebook: a long-lived container that binds three things together:

1. References (sources): curated content that answers are grounded against.
2. Chat history: Q&A over the references, stored persistently (private per user).
3. Created Content: outputs Copilot generates from the notebook (Pages, Word docs, PowerPoint, Excel, Audio Overview, Mind Maps, Study Guides, infographics).

Since the April 2026 redesign the UI is split into three panes: References on the left, Chat in the middle, Created Content on the right, all three visible at all times in a side-by-side view.

Grounding Mechanics (RAG-like)

Microsoft describes the mechanism as scoped grounding: “Copilot doesn't access your entire OneDrive, email, Teams chats, or the web, only using references you've added to the notebook.” Technically it is retrieval-augmented generation on a curated sub-corpus instead of the entire M365 graph.

• Single-file references are indexed directly.
• SharePoint site/folder references are evaluated dynamically: for each prompt, Copilot checks which files within the folder are relevant to your question and selects up to 300 of the most relevant files the user has permissions for (official Microsoft wording: “up to 300 most relevant files”).
• Answers include citations with click-through to the source files.

When to Use What? Tool Comparison

Notebooks can be reached through several entry points; the primary one remains the Copilot app (called the “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” until September 2026).

Two surfaces, one notebook. Since September 2026 Microsoft states this explicitly in the documentation: there is the lightweight Notebooks view in the Copilot app and the workspace view in OneNote. The same notebook opens in both, and no context is lost when you switch. For training this matters more than any feature list: if you just want to ask something quickly, stay in the Copilot app; if you are working on a project over a longer period, structuring notes and sorting pages, go to OneNote. The choice is not a one-way street.

From Copilot on the Web

1. Open m365.cloud.microsoft and sign in with a work account (Entra ID). That is the address the current support documentation gives.
2. Left sidebar → “Notebooks”. If the entry is missing, it has not rolled out in your tenant yet: use the app launcher (waffle menu at the top of the sidebar) → “Notebooks”.
3. “All notebooks” → “New notebook” → enter a name.
4. Add references (upload, drag and drop, OneDrive picker, SharePoint site picker).
5. “Create”: the notebook is ready to use.

You create further notebooks via the “+” button next to “Notebooks” in the sidebar.

Shortcut via Search new since 23.09.2026, Web: When a file shows up in the Quick Access section of Search in the Copilot app, you can file it without opening the notebook first: open the context menu → “Add to” → “Notebook” → pick the target notebook. Handy when you come across a relevant document while searching and want it in the project right away.

From OneNote (Windows, Web, iOS, Mac) Web & iOS GA since July 2026, Mac from late August 2026

In OneNote you can “convert” a OneNote notebook into a Copilot Notebook or add it as a source. This turns the classic, loosely structured OneNote into a source for structured Q&A, ideal for making historical note collections productive. Available on Windows (GA since March 2026), on Web (onenote.cloud.microsoft) and on iPhone/iPad (each GA from July 1, 2026). On Mac the rollout runs later than originally announced: with MC1409042 Microsoft set the window to late August to early September 2026 (Roadmap ID 565863). Access there is via the File menu in OneNote for Mac; an M365 Copilot license is required. The feature is default on; for Mac the Message Center explicitly names no admin switch to turn it off. On Windows, admins continue to control Copilot Notebook in the M365 admin center under Settings, OneNote, Copilot Notebook. On the iPhone you can additionally use “Capture” to record voice, photos and typed notes in one session and file them straight into the notebook. The same multimodal capture is coming to Windows (MC1405506, Roadmap ID 566322); Microsoft moved the window on September 2, 2026: GA is now late September to mid-October 2026 instead of the previously announced late July to mid-September. Requirements are an M365 Copilot license and a work or school account (Entra ID) in the Windows desktop app; admins can turn capture off via policy.

Since August 2026, Android has joined (MC1450130, Roadmap ID 567895, published August 7, 2026): preview from mid-August, GA wave mid to late September 2026. The flow is the same as on the iPhone: audio, photos and typed notes in one session; at the end, Copilot turns them into a structured Copilot Page in the notebook. Requirements are an M365 Copilot license and a SharePoint or OneDrive license (without them no notebook can be created and saved). The feature is default on; it can be turned off via the cloud policy “Capture in Copilot Notebooks for mobile devices” (see chapter 7).

From the M365 Copilot App on a Smartphone Android redesign GA target August 2026

In the mobile Microsoft 365 apps (iOS and Android) you can open existing notebooks and start new chats in them. Since August 2026, Microsoft has been bringing the redesigned Notebooks interface from the web to Android as well (Roadmap ID 566704, GA target August 2026): related chats, Created Content and References live there in the same persistent workspace whose context grounds Copilot responses across sessions. Multimodal capture is added via the OneNote app in each case: on iPhone/iPad since July 2026, on Android with the GA wave in mid to late September 2026 (see above).

From Teams / Outlook / Word

Indirectly: you can pin meeting notes from Teams chats, emails from Outlook, and Pages from Word/Loop as references to an existing notebook. The actual notebook object, however, is created in the Copilot app surface.

From the Loop App

Loop shows Copilot Notebooks in the same user container view. The primary entry point remains the M365 Copilot app; Loop is more of a visibility/overview surface here.

Limits per Tenant / User

4.1 Sources / References

References are the heart of a notebook: the curated data corpus Copilot answers against.

Supported Types

Standard vs. Premium Sources License difference

The official reference documentation (as of August 2026) divides source types into two groups. Anyone who only has Copilot Chat simply sees fewer options in the Add References dialog. Alongside the 50-reference limit, this is the second hard license difference in a mixed-license team, and the reason why a notebook built on Teams meetings and SharePoint sites only half works for Chat users.

Still open: For the two new formats .csv/.tsv and .jpg/.png, the reference documentation (as of September 2026) names no tier. The standard list already includes “images” generically, but a mapping of the specific extensions is missing. Anyone planning mixed-license notebooks should verify this in their own tenant at GA rather than inferring it from the format list.

Limits

• 300 reference slots active for grounding per notebook (May 2026 update: previously 100). More can be added, but only the first 300 are grounded. This applies to fully licensed Microsoft Copilot users.
• 50 references for Copilot Chat users: the official reference documentation (as of August 2026) names a hard limit of 50 references per notebook for the Chat tier; all 50 are grounded. The difference is not a grounding cutoff as with 300, but an upper limit when adding. In mixed-license teams this is practically the most important license difference: a notebook with 120 references is not navigable for Chat users.
• Up to 300 files dynamically from folder/SharePoint site references per prompt; Copilot picks the most relevant ones the user has permissions for.
• Practical thresholds instead of a hard per-file size: Microsoft names no official hard cap on upload size. In practice, Microsoft itself (Q&A answers, as of 2026) has documented the following effectiveness limits: summaries up to ~1.5 million words / 300 pages; Q&A works best under ~7,500 words; SharePoint URL references use the first ~36,000 characters; embedded files are indexed up to ~750 to 1,000 pages.
• Study Guide sub-limits (as of May 2026, official Microsoft documentation): flashcards, quiz and fill-in-the-blanks accept a maximum of 50,000 characters per source file. Summary, topics and matching have no documented character limit.
• External web URLs as a reference: late May 2026 rolling GA (MC1193414, Roadmap ID 516040). Check per tenant until the rollout is complete.

4.2 Prompts / Custom Instructions

Notebooks have their own Custom Instructions section: persistent, system-prompt-like instructions that are passed along with every chat in the notebook. Tone, formatting rules, language, output style: define all of it there once instead of repeating it in every prompt.

Always answer in professional business English and address the reader directly.
Use our brand tone: sober, fact-based, no marketing speak.
Max. 250 words per answer.
If unsure: cite the source, don't guess.

Single prompts in the chat cannot be “pinned”; if you want to reuse standard prompts, store them as Markdown in a Page inside the notebook.

4.3 Generated Content / Outputs

Significantly expanded in the April 2026 release and complemented in May/June 2026 with the Excel agent and infographics. Currently available:

• Copilot Pages: collaborative canvas, can be generated and edited straight from the notebook chat.
• Word document: the Word agent generates a complete .docx from notebook content. since April 2026
• PowerPoint presentation: the PowerPoint agent generates a .pptx from notebook content. since April 2026
• Audio Overview: podcast-style audio with two AI voices (male + female, neutral American). Available in EN, ES, JA, FR, DE, PT, IT, ZH.
• Video Overview: a short narrated video summary of the notebook content: key messages, visuals and voiceover in one clip. Builds on the Audio Overview and is the variant for people who would rather watch a project than read it (MC1208690, Roadmap ID 511793). Rollout from mid-November 2025, completed late February 2026; first in Frontier public preview, then for the remaining tenants. Default on, M365 Copilot license required, no admin action needed. Frontier first
• Mind Map: interactive visualization of topic relationships, with clickable nodes and drill-down summaries. since April 2026
• Study Guide: automatically generated quizzes, flashcards, topic summary pages (primarily for onboarding/learning contexts). since April 2026
• Excel workbook: the Excel agent generates a structured .xlsx from notebook content and references, asks clarifying questions and can then be edited further in Excel. Frontier May 2026, GA rollout June
• Infographic (Visual Overview): turns notebook content into a structured visual summary with key messages and relationships; preview, copy, download and auto-save in the notebook. Public preview from late May 2026, GA from late June (MC1317195)

Overview Redesign: One-Click Artifacts since July 29, 2026, Windows, Mac & Web

The Overview view of a notebook was redesigned in late July 2026 (Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes of July 29, 2026). It shows the notebook's AI summary and key insights in a tidy layout and, right next to them, surfaces the artifacts that can usefully be generated from the current content. One click is enough; a prompt is no longer necessary. Copilot derives the suggestions from notebook content and Microsoft 365 knowledge instead of waiting for an instruction.

Practical consequence for training: anyone who used to type “Turn this into a PowerPoint” now finds that entry point as a suggestion in the Overview. The prompt route continues to work unchanged; the redesign is an additional shortcut, not a replacement.

Message Center background (MC1411727 / Roadmap ID 566870): Microsoft runs the suggestion logic as a separate feature under the name Suggested artifacts. The public preview ran from early July to late August 2026, the GA wave from late July to late September 2026. For training this means: the suggestion strip may still be missing in a tenant even though the Overview redesign is already there; two separate waves, not one feature. Currently suggested are Word, Excel and PowerPoint; Microsoft has announced PDFs and Pages for a later release. The requirement is a license for Microsoft 365 Copilot (Premium) with access to Copilot Notebooks; the feature is default on and needs no admin action.

4.4 Sharing / Permissions

• The notebook owner is always the creator.
• Sharing model (as of May 2026): direct invitation by email address or user picker → members get full edit access (no read-only mode at present).
• No group sharing. Microsoft 365 groups cannot be added as members. The FAQ also gives the reason: a notebook lives in its creator’s personal SharePoint Embedded container and follows that person’s lifecycle, and a group has no place there. Microsoft states that a solution for group-managed notebooks is “in progress”.
• The sharing link only works as long as the cloud policy “Create and view Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks” is enabled tenant-wide or for the user.

4.5 Memory / Personalization

• Notebooks have no memory system of their own in the sense of ChatGPT memory.
• But: notebook-specific Custom Instructions act like per-workspace memory.
• The notebook chat is persistent but private per user: even if you share the notebook, others do not see your chat history.

Grounding Model: What Happens per Prompt?

When you ask a question in the notebook chat, the following flow runs:

1. The user prompt is combined with the Custom Instructions.
2. The system selects the references relevant to the prompt from the max. 300.
3. For folder/SharePoint site references: dynamic selection of up to 300 of the most relevant files with a permissions check per file.
4. Selected content is loaded into the LLM context (retrieval).
5. The LLM generates the answer and inserts citations with click-through.
6. The answer is stored in the persistent notebook chat (private per user).

Modes: Work vs. Web

• Work mode (default in the notebook): uses tenant data + the references added in the notebook + the web where applicable (if explicitly allowed as an external reference).
• Web mode: deliberately restricted; without an M365 Copilot license only web mode, but then no notebook creation is possible.
• Notebooks are by definition work mode only.

Multi-Source Reasoning

Copilot can compare and contrast references. Example: “Compare the pricing structure in Contract A.pdf against B.pdf” works; citations show exactly which source each claim comes from.

Quality tends to drop when many small references are compared against a few large ones. Microsoft implicitly recommends a curated, small number of sources (see Best Practices).

How Do You Share a Notebook?

1. In the notebook: “Share” at the top right → enter names or email addresses → “Invite”. Individuals only, no Microsoft 365 groups.
2. Invited users receive a link + notification.
3. The sharing link only works if the cloud policy “Create and view Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks” is enabled for the recipient.

Permissions Model

• As of May 2026: no read-only tier. Anyone who is invited can edit: add references, change Custom Instructions, generate Created Content.
• The notebook owner remains the creator; the container is user-owned.
• If the owner leaves the organization (account deletion): the container follows the same OneDrive lifecycle rule as the rest of Microsoft 365, with the same configurable retention period (default: 30 days active, then recycle bin, then permanently deleted). Contrary to what this guide previously documented, a permanent transfer to a new person is possible, via PowerShell using principal owner transfer. Details and the limits of that transfer are in chapter 9.

Co-Editing Behavior

Tenant Boundary

• Copilot Notebooks runs within the Microsoft 365 service boundary. Sources are not used for LLM training (“Copilot Notebooks doesn't use user data to train the large language model”).
• Storage: every notebook lives in a personal SharePoint Embedded container of its creator. Container quota counts against the tenant's SharePoint quota.
• Data residency follows the M365 tenant region (EUDB for EU tenants if opted in).

Permissions Inheritance

• When you add a SharePoint site as a source, Copilot honors the existing permissions: a member only sees the files in the source they already have read access to.
• Citations ALWAYS show only sources the respective user is allowed to see.

Admin Controls (Cloud Policy)

Managed via config.office.com → Customization → Policy Management:

• “Create and view Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks”: enabled by default. Disabled → users cannot create new notebooks, but existing ones remain visible/editable.
• “Enable code previews for AI-generated content in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Copilot Pages”: controls the code preview feature in Pages.
• “Capture in Copilot Notebooks for mobile devices” new, August 2026: controls multimodal capture (audio, photos, typed notes) in the OneNote app on Android and iOS. Default on. This is the switch that lets you prevent recordings on work phones without turning off Notebooks as a whole (MC1450130). For Windows, Microsoft also names a policy to turn it off, without naming it in the Message Center (MC1405506); for OneNote on Mac there is still no switch (MC1409042).
• Policies can be scoped per user group.
• Rollout latency: changes to existing policies take up to 90 minutes, new ones up to 24 hours.

Audit / Purview

Notebook actions are visible in Purview Audit, but always under the application name Loop. There is no separate filter for “Copilot Notebooks” or “Copilot Pages”.

How Do Sensitivity Labels Apply?

Notebooks honor Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels. If a file is marked with a label such as “Confidential: do not Copilot” and a matching DLP policy exists, the file is not used for grounding. The file may appear as a title in citations, but its content does not flow into the answer.

Setting Up a DLP Policy

• Policy location: “Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat”.
• Condition: Content contains > Sensitivity labels.
• The policy selects the appropriate label & defines what should happen (e.g. block from Copilot grounding).
• Custom template only: the Copilot location exists exclusively in the custom policy, and as soon as it is on, all other locations in the same policy are disabled.
• Not combinable: Sensitive info types and Sensitivity labels must not be in the same rule; two rules in one policy are allowed.

The Four Conditions of the Copilot Location at a Glance

For the location “Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat” the Purview documentation lists four combinations of condition and action. Two of them target not the sources but the prompt, and those are regularly overlooked in notebook training:

Important for notebooks: the SIT rules apply to the prompt, not to the references. A notebook with clean sources therefore does not prevent a user from typing a passport number into the notebook chat, and conversely the prompt rule does not block a sensitive file attached as a reference. Both layers are needed.

What the Label Rule Covers (and What It Doesn't)

The Purview documentation (as of July 2026) precisely delimits the scope of the sensitivity label rule, which matters because notebooks allow files and emails as references:

• Files: covered, both stored and currently open.
• Emails: only those sent on or after January 1, 2025. Older emails in the mailbox are not caught by the rule.
• Calendar invitations: not supported.
• In Word, Excel and PowerPoint the policy is evaluated when the file is opened. A label set mid-session only takes effect at the next opening.
• Policy changes take up to four hours to arrive in the Copilot experience.
• Files uploaded directly into the prompt cannot be content-scanned by DLP; only the typed prompt text is checked.

New: Excluding External Emails from Grounding Public preview

Purview has given the Copilot location a new condition: Email is received from > External users with the action Prevent Copilot from processing content (MC1301714). This lets you exclude emails from senders outside your own accepted domains from grounding, summaries and citations. Only the sender domain is checked as metadata; the email body is not inspected, and the user continues to access their email unchanged. Currently public preview, GA announced for late January 2027.

Real-World Trust

Languages for Generated Outputs (Sensitivity-Relevant)

• Audio Overview languages (official, 8): EN, ES, JA, FR, DE, PT, IT, ZH. Customization: format, voice, style/tone, duration.
• Mind Map & Study Guide: the language set is not documented separately by Microsoft. Rule of thumb according to Microsoft Support: “Copilot Notebooks is available in the same languages as Microsoft 365 Copilot.” In practice, the language of the source material works; validate with spot checks in your team's working language before a production rollout.
• Study Guide eligibility (as of May 2026): Education users aged 13 and up, enterprise users. Personal/Family/Premium support announced, not yet rolled out.

Versioning Behavior per Element

Persistence

• The notebook persists for the lifetime of the user account.
• Lifecycle on account deletion: active containers keep running; on account deletion the same configurable retention period applies as for OneDrive (a single setting governs both), then the recycle bin, then permanent deletion. The frequently quoted 30 and 93 days are the defaults, not the law; check your own tenant.

Offboarding: what happens to a notebook when someone leaves

Microsoft expanded the admin documentation on this considerably in September 2026, and the content corrects a widespread assumption. A departing person’s container does follow the OneDrive lifecycle rule, but with one manual step that OneDrive does not have. OneDrive automatically delegates access to the manager on departure and sends an email. For the user-owned container there is neither automatic delegation nor notification. If nobody is granted access and informed before the retention period ends, the content is gone for good. This is exactly where it fails in practice, because the step is in no standard offboarding checklist.

There are two routes, and they lead to different outcomes. Preserve content: in the SharePoint admin center under SharePoint Embedded, Active containers, filter by “Application name: Loop” and find the container (it is called “Pages” or “My workspace”, depending on which app the person opened first), add a custodian as an owner and send them the container redirect URL. They then copy out whatever needs to stay. Transfer the container: PowerShell can permanently change the principal owner (Set-SPOContainer with PrincipalOwnerTransfer). The container then belongs to the new person and the deletion schedule runs from their account. This transfer exists only for user-owned containers, and OneDrive cannot do it at all.

What can actually be salvaged depends on the content type. There is no bulk transfer of a notebook; the new person rebuilds it by hand.

Export Options

• Single page export: a Copilot Page can be generated/exported as Word, PDF or PowerPoint.
• Full notebook export: no single “Export notebook as ZIP” button. Workaround: generate Pages/Word/PowerPoint individually and file them.
• Admin export possible via Purview eDiscovery or SharePoint Embedded admin tools.
• New since July 2026: HTML conversion in eDiscovery (MC1323262, Roadmap ID 561492, rollout mid-June to early July 2026, E5). When exporting from a search or adding to a review set, Loop and Copilot Pages files (.loop, .page) can be converted to HTML automatically and thus read in the browser. The option is off by default and has to be enabled per export run.

Billing

• Per M365 Copilot user license (approx. 30 USD per month in Commercial, plus the underlying M365 suite): full feature set.
• New since June 11, 2026: also for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users (Commercial and Education). Notebooks thus reaches the cheaper Chat tier (e.g. E3/E5/Business Standard/Premium with Copilot Chat). Chat users, however, have guardrails on advanced analytics and agent creation that fully licensed users don't have. Multimodal input, Graph data, Purview compliance and real-time collaboration are available in both tiers. In mixed-license teams everyone works together in the same notebook; only fully licensed M365 Copilot users, however, can add premium sources and use premium AI features. On top of that, since August 2026 a hard reference limit of 50 for Chat users is documented (fully licensed: 300 grounded references), the difference that hurts first in large project notebooks.
• “Basic” tiers (MC1384425): Microsoft runs this rollout under the product names Copilot Chat (Basic) and M365 Copilot (Basic); no M365 Copilot add-on is needed for it. Important for training planning: the OneNote integration is not fully available to Basic users. For commercial Copilot Chat (Basic) customers, Copilot Notebooks in OneNote is initially available only on the web, not in the OneNote desktop client. Anyone training a mixed group should therefore not plan the OneNote part as a given. As with all notebooks, storage sits in the user's own SharePoint Embedded container and counts against the tenant's SharePoint quota.
• No per-notebook, per-token or per-audio-generation costs visible; all notebook features are included in the license.
• Consumer: included in Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro, but cut down. No notebook sharing: the Share doc says so, and for all four plans including Pro. No Capture, no Mind Maps and still the old interface: the FAQ says so, but there only for Personal, Family and Premium.

Known Limits (as of August 2026)

Eight proven notebook patterns for typical DACH mid-market and agency use cases. Each blueprint contains recommended sources, Custom Instructions and the realistic effort-saving effect.

Ten Rules from Production Practice

1. Source discipline beats source volume. Better 10 to 20 curated top sources than 300 loose ones. Even though Microsoft raised the limit from 100 to 300 in May 2026: grounding quality drops with topic drift. References beyond 300 are ignored.
2. Use Custom Instructions as a system prompt. Tone, formatting rules, language, “don't answer without a citation”: define all of it there once instead of in every prompt.
3. Check SharePoint permissions BEFORE adding a folder reference. Anyone who adds a folder gives Copilot visibility of all files the user is allowed to see in that folder. A permissions sanity check prevents unpleasant surprises.
4. Set sensitivity labels at file level, not just on the notebook. DLP protection applies to the file, not the notebook container.
5. Anticipate source updates. References are pointers, not snapshots. If a file changes, the answer changes: good for “always fresh”, bad for “why was the answer different yesterday”. Pin important sources as a snapshot where appropriate.
6. ALWAYS check citations. Even a grounded model hallucinates. Clicking the citations is a mandatory step before reuse.
7. One notebook = one project. Don't cram several topics into one notebook; grounding quality drops with topic drift.
8. Use the Audio Overview as a mobile format. Anyone consuming briefings in the car or on the train gets a real use case extension. Works in German.
9. Pages as the hub document in the notebook. Don't let important outputs get lost in the chat; pull them straight out as a Page and keep editing there.
10. Maintain the member list deliberately. There is no group sharing, every member is invited individually. So set fixed review dates and put project notebooks into offboarding.

Pitfalls (The 8 Most Important)

1. Read-only sharing doesn't exist. Whoever invites grants full edit rights. Better not to share highly sensitive notebooks; extract the output (Page/Word) instead and share it separately.
2. External links not available in all tenants (May 2026). Anyone counting on web URLs as sources should check whether the feature has already rolled out in their own tenant (MC1193414).
3. “Loop” as the audit app name is confusing. The compliance team searches Purview for “Copilot Notebooks” and finds nothing; everything runs under the app Loop.
4. Notebooks have no recycle bin. Deleted = gone. No user restore, no admin restore of a single item (only the entire container within the soft-delete period).
5. Source drift with folder references. You link a SharePoint folder, someone drops a confidential file into it → the file becomes part of your notebook's grounding context without you having consciously added it.
6. “Work” vs. “Web” mode confusion. A notebook is always work mode. Anyone who clicked “Web” in regular Copilot Chat and then switches to a notebook sometimes thinks web data is grounded too; it isn't (unless external URLs have been added as references).
7. Sensitivity label enforcement is not 100%. There have been documented edge cases (VentureBeat 2025/2026) in which labels were bypassed. Therefore: don't treat DLP as the only line of defense.
8. Practicing at home is not the same as being able to do it at work. Anyone trying out Notebooks with Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium works in a trimmed-down version: no notebook sharing, no Capture, no Mind Maps, old interface. Conversely, consumer users in company training search in vain for buttons that don't exist at home.

Troubleshooting (Top 5)

1. “Notebooks” module not visible in the sidebar

The cloud policy “Create and view Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks” is disabled. Have an admin check in config.office.com. After re-enabling, wait up to 90 minutes. Second cause until early October 2026: the redesigned Notebooks experience in the Copilot app (MC1420901) only started rolling out in late September and may not have reached your tenant yet. In that case, go in via the app launcher or OneNote.

2. Notebook creation fails with “Storage Error”

The user has no SharePoint/OneDrive license, or OneDrive creation is disabled tenant-wide. Check in the M365 admin center.

3. Citation shows a file, but the answer says “I can't find info on that”

The file has a sensitivity label with a DLP policy “exclude from Copilot grounding”. The title appears in the citation, the content doesn't flow into the answer. Verify via the Purview DLP audit log.

4. Answers get more generic the more sources are in the notebook

Probably more than 300 references (May 2026 limit, previously 100). Only the first 300 are grounded. Solution: clean up, remove old references, or split the notebook, and at the same time check whether topic drift in the sources is lowering quality.

5. External URL not accepted as a reference

The feature has not yet rolled out in the tenant (rolling GA since May 2026, MC1193414). Workaround: copy the web content manually into a .docx and upload it.

On top of that, Microsoft’s own documentation contradicts itself here. The Add references page writes, next to the “Link” button, that you can only link documents from your own OneDrive or SharePoint and that content outside the organization cannot be added at all. Two sections further down the same page lists “external URLs” as a standard source for Copilot Chat users, and the How it works page explicitly says you can reference individual web URLs. In practice this means: do not spend long searching if it does not work, test it in your own tenant and record the result for the training.