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Shared Notes vs. Private Notes
Shared Notes vs. Private Notes

Collaborate with others or keep some notes to yourself.

Katharine Bacon avatar
Written by Katharine Bacon
Updated over a week ago

We want to make it easy for people to stay on track in a meeting and remove the need to switch between tabs or tools to take notes. Plus, when note taking is collaborative, more people can participate, making things more inclusive.

Before your meeting starts, set an agenda from your dashboard. When you enter the meeting, your agenda will pre-populate the Shared Notes panel. Shared Notes have a light background.

Any Workspace Member invited to the meeting can contribute to and edit the Shared Notes. If you are meeting with Guests, they'll have access to Shared Notes by default, but you can choose to turn off their access before the meeting begins. Notes are accessible within the On-Demand Recording after your meeting ends.

Entering the "/" key on your keyboard opens up a list of note taking options. This allows you to format your notes, and assign action items.

As you take notes during the meeting, each line of notes is time stamped. To see the time stamps, simply hover over the text. You can click on the time stamp to jump to that portion of the transcript to gain more context. This is especially helpful after the fact when trying to find a key moment to rewatch (an alternative is to mark a key moment as it happens using Bookmark).

You can toggle the Notes panel open and closed by clicking on the Notes icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. Here's what the Vowel meeting looks like with the Notes panel closed.

If your meeting starts without an agenda, you will be presented with a list of template options for your in-meeting notes or you can simply begin typing.

Private Notes

Sometimes, you'll want to jot down some notes without others seeing them. Enter Private Notes.

To switch to Private Notes, click on the disguise icon at the top of the Notes panel. Private Notes are easily distinguishable from Shared Notes because they are titled "Private Notes" in the top left of the notes panel and have a dark grey background.

Similar to Shared Notes, you will be presented with a list of template options for your notes or you can simply begin typing. No one else can see your Private Notes during or after the meeting.

Private Notes have both internal and external meeting use cases.

If you are meeting with external partners or clients and want to take notes that they cannot see, use Private Notes. In this scenario you can also use Private Notes to ensure you ask all the right discovery questions or hit all your talking points.

During internal presentations, it can be helpful to use Private Notes to jot down questions or ideas to hold until time for Q&A.

A power move is to use the Raise Hand feature and Private Notes to write down the question...so you don't forget it by the time it's your turn in the queue.

Questions? Send us a chat message or email us at hello@vowel.com.

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