Working Offline in OneNote at 30,000 Feet

Your crack sales team for your mobile phone company travels across the world--from London to Shanghai. Figuring out a discounted phone offer or other deals is tricky because tax rates, cultures, and lots of other things change from country to county. To save each other time, team members pass along tips by adding them to a shared OneNote notebook stored on a company SharePoint site.

But how do they add new info when they're working on a plane or in a Parisian café, and then when they get back to the office, sync it with the notebook on the SharePoint site.  Since OneNote and SharePoint were designed to work together, it's easy to do that.

Note:  This scenario assumes you have downloaded a copy of a OneNote notebook from SharePoint to your laptop. 

Configure your notebook to work offline

1.  Click on the highlighted Sync Status icon in your team notebook.

 
2. On the Shared Notebook Synchronization dialog, select the option to Work offline - sync only when I click "Sync All."

 

Notice that your notebook status now appears as Not Connected, so as you make additions to the notebook, OneNote will not try to automatically sync it.

Sync to SharePoint after you're back online

Once you return to the office and are connected to corporate network, you can sync all the offline changes with the notebook on your SharePoint site.

1.  Click on the highlighted sync status icon in your notebook.




 
2.  On the Shared Notebook Synchronization dialog box, click either Sync All or Sync Now.





The changes you made while cruising at 30,000 feet are now available to all your co-workers.

Re-configure OneNote to automatically sync to SharePoint

To keep from manually having to sync your notebook, you can change it back to automatically sync to SharePoint.

Select the Sync automatically whenever there are changes.


 

 Now you can easily collaborate with your co-workers almost instantly.  But what if they're making changes and syncing at the same time as you?  To understand how OneNote handles read this article about how to Work together in a shared OneNote notebook.