Share via

OneNote and Teams: integrating personal and school accounts

Anonymous
2019-08-22T15:45:25+00:00

I've had this problem for a few years now:

I use OneNote from my personal account for all my lab experiments. I want to keep them on the personal account because while the institution I am at might change (and hence the school/work account), my personal account will stay the same.

For my projects, I am mentoring students who possess school accounts. However, it is known that I cannot share my personal account notebook with their school accounts. To resolve this, I end up sharing the notebooks to their personal accounts. 

This is a really poor but workable solution. 

Now, my institution has Teams which I want to start using. However, to access Teams, I need to use my school account. When I link Teams to my OneNote, it only accesses my school acct for OneNote - which has none of my notebooks! 

How do I resolve this? I want to use Teams (on my school acct) with my students, but also have all of us access the OneNote notebooks from within Teams.

(Side note, there doesn't seem to be a Question category for Teams, only for OneNote?)

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

0 comments

3 answers

Sort by: Most helpful
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2019-08-23T13:55:27+00:00

    Thanks, but that is a very tedious process since I have at least 10 notebooks, each with multiple sections. The biggest issue with it would be the lack of sync between the copied and original notebooks.

    I found an easier way to copy the notebooks onto the school account (needing to use OneNote 2016 to access the File menu and Export). But the issue of sync remains. 

    If I start working on these notebooks on my school account, what will I do when I leave my school? I assume I will need to export all of them one by one to a new school account?

    I hope you understand the tediousness and frustration. Just want to make sure Microsoft is aware of this so it can work on an integration of sorts?

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. Anonymous
    2019-08-24T13:56:09+00:00

    Hi faaizenam,

    I could understand your concern. It's very important for your to get the notebook saved in personal account sync to your work/school account.

    Unfortunately, if you copy the notebook to work/school account or using OneNote 2016 Export feature to get the notebook, it's the expected behavior that new changes won't sync to personal account, vice versa.

    I test from my side and find that it is possible to share the notebook in personal account to work/school account. And if you want to share the work/school account notebook with personal account, firstly you need to enable external sharing for your tenant.

    Use the Share notebook as a workaround, the notebook will sync fine. However, please note that the shared notebook won't appear in Microsoft Teams. Really sorry for the inconvenience and trouble.

    For integrating personal and school accounts in OneNote and Teams, I recommend sending your valuable feedback to UserVoice, this would be the best method to let the developers know your requirement, help improve the product and make it better for you and others. Really sorry for the inconvenience again.

    Your understanding is highly appreciated.

    Best regards,

    Tina

    [Updated by Tina Chen MSFT, 14:06, August 24(UTC)]

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments
  3. Anonymous
    2019-08-22T18:55:48+00:00

    Hi faaizenam,

    From your description, I understand you want to access your notebooks within Microsoft Teams and work with your students, but your notebooks are saved in personal OneDrive.

    When you mentioned "When I link Teams to my OneNote, it only accesses my school acct for OneNote ",

    I suppose you add the OneNote tab in your Teams channel (if not, feel free to correct me).

    It is expected that the OneNote tab in Teams only displays the notebooks saved in your work/school account.

    As a workaround, you may try following to copy the notes from notebooks saved in personal account to the notebook saved in your work/school account.

    1.Open OneNote for Windows 10 application, sign in your work/school account, then create a new notebook in this account. (it will saved in your OneDrive for business)

    2.Then click the name of the current the notebook, click More Notebooks, click "+ Add account", sign in your personal account,.

    3.Find your notebooks saved in personal account and open them.

    4.In your personal notebook, right click a section and choose Move/Copy, when the Move/Copy Section windows opens, select the new notebook created in your work/school account, click Copy.

    (I recommend you use Copy so that both of your accounts have those notebooks)

    Based on my test, it's not available to copy multiple sections at once, so you need to copy sections one by one, sorry for the inconvenience.)

    5.After you finish copying the sections to the new notebook, go to Teams, add the notebook by adding OneNote tab, your new notebook should appear in the notebook list.

    By the way, according to my test, to let the team members(your students) see the notebook in Teams, you need to share the notebook with them, or they may not have access to the notebook.

    Hope above helps.

    Best regards,

    Tina

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments