Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks are like NotebookLM for your own files—summarize PDFs, Word docs, and PowerPoints, ask research questions, and turn notes into audio, no matter the topic.
In this video, I’ll show you how to use Copilot Notebooks step by step. I’ll upload example files (in my case, about the electric vehicle industry) and show you how to ask smart questions, compare insights, and even draft content—but you can use any subject or project you want.
Whether you’re researching for school, work, or personal projects, Copilot Notebooks give you a focused workspace with AI assistance that feels like having your own research partner.
Have you heard of Google's NotebookLM where you can gather your research and let AI help you think? Well, Microsoft has quietly built something very similar right in Microsoft 365 Copilot. It's called Copilot Notebooks, and it can completely change the way you organize, research, and create, all without leaving Microsoft 365 Copilot. Hi, I'm Jamie from Teachers Tech and in this video I'm going to show you Microsoft Copilot notebooks, what they are, how they compare to Notebook LM, and exactly how to use them. These notebooks don't just help you organize and summarize your content. They can even turn your notes into audio files you can listen to, making your research and projects even more flexible. By the end of this video, you'll know how to start your own notebook, add content, and use Copilot to pull insights and draft ideas based on what's inside. Let's jump in. What you see here is my Microsoft 365 Copilot account that I've logged into. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required to use Copilot notebooks which is currently rolling out. Additionally, accounts must have a SharePoint or one drive license. You'll see that you can access notebooks right here. So, first, what are they? Think of them as a focused workspace where you can collect files, notes, links, and ideas. Instead of copilot searching your entire organization, it zeros on what's in that notebook. Perfect for projects, lesson plans, reports, or research. Step number one is to create your notebook. So, I'm going to create co-pilot notebook. I have different files here. I could grab these ones cuz I've tested it out before, but I'm going to attach cloud files to show you I did it the first time. I could go to my files. This is in my one drive. And I could go and grab everything from this here. So you can see there's some powerpoints, some PDFs in here. So I'm going to select this and I have to give it a name. The report is going to be I'm going to do some research about EVs, electric vehicles in the future, pros and cons. These papers and powerpoints and word documents all relate to that, but this will give you an idea how you could be using it for other projects as well. Now uh you can see right away we have the documents and this is where it's going to be grounded in all these documents. I can add references here. So if I click on it, you could add some more if need be. You'll see where it says link. This is only to links inside your one drive that you already have. You can't go to the web and add a web page. That's one difference with how notebook LM works. You could go get a YouTube video. website. You can't do that here. This is going to be all the things that you have that are already in your Microsoft 365 Copilot account. So now at this point we can go ahead and start asking some questions. Let's start with some research and summarization. So I'm going to ask give me a summary of all the documents I've uploaded about the electric vehicle industry and I'm going to send this off. It might take about you know 30 40 seconds for it to come back and give this uh the information. Now, that was less than 30 seconds and we have the summary here. I'm just going to scroll down and you can see what I like. And this is like notebook LM. They have everything cited. So again, everything's grounded in what I gave it. So you're collecting the information, curating it, putting it together, and what Copilot's doing is using that. But now notice as I hover over uh any of these things, I can ask about this. So if I was going to list key points, give me bulleted list of the key points. Now this is down here and I could go and uh wherever I see those uh citations, get information, ask questions about those to dig in even more. Let's try a comparative and analytical question. So this time I'm going to ask it extract the list of pros and cons of electrical vehicles mentioned here. I'm going to send this off. And again, it'll take a few seconds, but we'll get that list, everything cited back to referencing in the material I gave it. Now, that didn't take very long that time. It looked like it pulled it from the one document here. So, I might go back and ask it a question about maybe checking the other ones as well. We can even uh it's giving some suggestions down here. Make a comparison table. I can send that off and Copilot will design that table that I can h quickly copy and paste out of here as well. Let's try one more thing before we get it to make our podcast that we can listen to. I want to see how it does with some content creation. And this time I'm going to ask it to write a LinkedIn post summarizing the key insights from these reports. I'll send that off. And here we go. In a few seconds, we have this that we could uh copy paste out of here, input into a LinkedIn post. Now, the thing that really makes this probably most like notebook LM is its ability to uh create a podcast. And if I go over to my notebooks here, I just want to point out uh we can navigate.
I'm just going to click on it again. And right at the top, we get the audio overview. Simply, we can just click on it and it's going to start generating. Now, this takes a few minutes and I'm not going to get you to watch all this. And after about two minutes, it's all done. You can see that they created a 15 minutes and 22 second podcast here. I'll just hit play. Hey there, everyone. Glad you're joining us for this overview of the voices sound nice, very similar to what notebook still sounds a little today. They're explosive. We can skip ahead. Different countries face very different change the speed. If you want to listen from leading researchers and policy experts more quickly. Uh if you want to delete this, you can see there's the delete this audio overview. So it gives you a different way to consume all this in knowledge, right? So I like this. I've always liked this in notebook LM. I like this in notebooks copilot here. It just gives me a different way to take all this information I have and to sit back and listen to it and maybe think about things a little differently. Right before I finish up this video, I just want to point out a couple extra things. Now, we do have the co-pilot instructions. So, you can tell a co-pilot how to respond in the notebook. Uh, it gives you an example here. But, if there's a certain way you wanted to respond, uh, set that before you start and then you can get things kind of more exactly how you want. And the other thing I want to point out is, so we had references down here. Now that I've asked a few questions, if I go to chats, you can see if I click on this one, this was the chat that I was having before when I was asking different questions uh with the resources that I gave into my notebooks. And then we can navigate back and then you'll have your list of notebooks as you create more and more. Very simple to use all of these. I hope you like this little intro to notebooks with inside Copilot. If you are uh somebody that has a license and if you've used Notebook LM, maybe you want to keep it all inside your Microsoft 365. Thanks for watching this time on Teachers Tech. I'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials.
