How to take notes in a Microsoft Teams meeting, including as a guest

Microsoft Teams has a notes feature built into every meeting. It works for invited people inside the organiser's organisation, and not at all for external attendees. This guide is for anyone taking notes in Teams calls, and particularly freelancers and consultants who join clients' Teams meetings from outside. It covers Teams' own meeting notes before, during and after the call, who can open them, what a guest should use instead, and how a notetaker records the call. The details come from Microsoft's page on taking meeting notes in Teams as of October 2026.

How do you take notes during a Teams meeting?

Join the meeting and select Notes in the meeting controls, or More actions, then Notes. A Meeting notes pane opens beside the call, where you can write notes, an agenda and tasks. Microsoft says changes "can be viewed live by people in the meeting", and that you can pop the notes out into a separate window.

Any attendee or the organiser can start the notes. Tag a person with @ to assign an agenda item or a task to them.

How do you add notes to a Teams meeting before it starts?

Add an agenda to the invitation. In the Teams calendar, select New, and in Details select Add an agenda; for a meeting that already exists, open it and add or update the agenda. Participants receive the invitation with the meeting notes attached, so everyone arrives knowing the plan.

Schedule from a computer. Microsoft says scheduling from mobile does not support adding notes, though you can open and edit the notes from the mobile app during and after the meeting.

Where do Teams meeting notes go after the call?

Nowhere you have to save them to. Microsoft says meeting notes "are saved automatically and can be viewed and edited after the meeting ends". To find them:

Where	Steps
Teams calendar	Open the past meeting, Expand meeting details, scroll to notes
The meeting event	View event, then View recap, then Notes
Mobile	Open the meeting chat, then Apps, Recap, Notes
Office.com	Microsoft says the notes can be shared and edited there as a Loop document

What should Teams meeting notes contain?

An agenda before the call, markers during it, and three short lists at the end. The agenda gives the notes their headings; the lists are what anyone reads afterwards.

Agenda       the items, in order, added to the invitation
Notes        one line per point: D decision, A action, # figure, Q question
Decisions    one sentence each, in the words that were agreed
Tasks        what – @person – by when
Open         questions still waiting, and who owes the answer

Use the task list for actions and tag the owner with @, so the person sees it is theirs rather than finding out from the minutes. Give every task a date in words, "Friday 30 October" rather than "Friday", because the notes stay open long after the week they were written in.

Shared notes are written by several people at once, which is their strength and their weakness. Agree at the start who tidies the decisions and tasks at the end; otherwise everyone assumes someone else did.

Who can open and edit Teams meeting notes?

People inside the organiser's organisation who were invited. Microsoft is explicit about everyone else:

• "Any attendee or organizer can start notes and view changes as they're made."
• "People who aren't directly invited to a meeting might have limited access to its meeting notes."
• "External attendees won't be able to access or edit meeting notes."

That last line matters to anyone who joins clients' calls from outside. When a client hosts the Teams meeting, you are an external attendee, and the notes pane is not yours to use. If the client issued you a member account in their organisation, joining with it should put you inside their organisation rather than outside it; the client-issued Microsoft 365 account guide covers when that applies.

What should a guest use instead?

Notes of your own, kept outside the client's tenant, plus a recap you send afterwards so the client has a copy too.

1. Open your own notes file before the call, with the client, date, attendees and agenda at the top.
2. Write markers, not sentences: decisions, actions with owner and date, figures, open questions. Taking notes during a meeting you are also running has a shorthand that keeps up.
3. Use live captions to catch a figure or a name, not as a record; Microsoft says Teams doesn't save captions.
4. Ask the organiser for the transcript if one was started; a participant from another organisation can read it live but not afterwards. See how to get a Teams meeting transcript.
5. Send a recap the same day, so the record exists on both sides.

Share one window, not your screen, when you present: a notes file showing another client's name in its title is the commonest way client material leaks. Keeping client meeting notes separate covers the habits.

What about the AI notes in Teams?

They are a different feature. The meeting notes above are written by people in the meeting. The AI recap needs an add-on licence. Microsoft's recap page says people who weren't invited, or aren't in the organiser's organisation, won't have access to it, though the organiser, a co-organiser or a presenter can email AI summaries to invited participants, including people outside the organisation. As a guest, you get what they choose to send.

Notes, transcript or recording: which do you need?

Notes for most calls, a transcript when exact wording will matter, and a recording only when someone needs to see or hear it again. They answer different questions:

Record	Good for	In Teams, kept by
Notes	Decisions, tasks, the short version	The organiser's organisation
Transcript	Quoting what was said, finding a figure	The organiser's OneDrive
Recording	Seeing a demo again, settling a dispute	The organiser's OneDrive

All three belong to the organiser's side when the client hosts. If you need any of them afterwards, ask before the call, not after; how to get a Teams meeting transcript covers the transcript, and transcribing without recording the choice between the two.

How does TrackHeros take notes in a Teams meeting?

As a participant, so it works the same whether you host or attend. The TrackHeros notetaker joins the call from its Teams link about two minutes before the start, under a name you set per client, and, if the meeting has a lobby, waits there to be admitted. It records the call, collects the captions for the speakers' names, and makes a transcript in English from the meeting's language, whichever of close to 100 it is. The summary lists decisions and action items with owners and dates.

Everything is filed under the client in your own TrackHeros workspace, not in the client's Microsoft 365 tenant, and the assistant answers questions from that client's meetings only, citing who said it and when. The organiser still decides whether the bot gets in, and the client should know it is coming. More on the Microsoft Teams notetaker page.