For SharePoint & OneDrive

AI for SharePoint & OneDrive - chat with your files, cited.

Sidenote is a browser extension (Chrome, Edge and Firefox) that reads your SharePoint and OneDrive files through delegated, read-only Microsoft Graph access: Word docs, PDFs, decks. Ask a question and every answer carries a citation that takes you to the exact passage. No Copilot license required.

Delegated read-only Graph access · Works with SharePoint Online & OneDrive

company.sharepoint.com · Expenses policySidenote
Finance · Expenses policy

Employees may purchase work items without prior sign-off up to £75 per item. Anything above that threshold must be approved in advance by your line manager before the purchase is made. Receipts are required for all claims.

Sidenote
What is the limit before approval?
You can spend up to £75 per item without sign-off 1. Above £75, your line manager must approve it in advance 2.
The problem

Everything's in SharePoint. Nothing's findable.

The runbook, the policy, the architecture decision, last quarter's deck - all there, all real, all buried under nested folders and three near-identical versions of the same file. SharePoint search ranks them about the same, and the deck's answer is sitting in a speaker note nobody opens.

Sidenote reads the file you're on and answers the question, then shows you the passage it used, so you can tell at a glance whether it's still true.

How it works

How Sidenote works on SharePoint & OneDrive.

STEP 01

Sign in with Microsoft.

A one-time, read-only sign-in with your own Microsoft 365 account. Most tenants need nothing more; locked-down tenants may need a single admin consent for the read-only Graph permissions.

STEP 02

Open a file, ask a question.

Open a Word doc, PDF, deck or site page from SharePoint or OneDrive. Sidenote pulls it through Microsoft Graph and answers - summary, plain-English explanation, or chat.

STEP 03

Click a citation, see the passage.

Every claim is grounded in a quoted chunk of the file. Click the chip and Sidenote takes you to the exact passage - including the right slide and its speaker notes.

Pulling an answer from several files? Bundle them into a Collection and ask once - each citation names its source file. Prefer the head-on pitch? See chat with documents.

Use cases

What teams ask SharePoint - and how Sidenote answers.

  • “What's the rollback procedure?”

    Sidenote reads the runbook in the doc library and quotes the exact step - not the superseded version filed next to it.

  • “Why did we choose this architecture?”

    Decision records buried in a Word doc surface in seconds, with the trade-off paragraph quoted back to you.

  • “What did the QBR deck actually say?”

    Sidenote reads the slides and the speaker notes, and cites the slide the number came from. Decks stop being write-only.

  • “What's our policy on data retention?”

    It finds the clause in the policy document and quotes it, with the date it was last reviewed.

  • “Who owns this process, and how do I escalate?”

    Reads the process page and the escalation matrix together, citing each source file.

  • “I'm new - where do I even start?”

    New joiners query the team site directly instead of hunting through nested folders nobody can navigate.

Read-only by design

Delegated, read-only, and only what you open.

Sidenote uses delegated Microsoft Graph access: it acts as you, sees only what your account can see, and only reads a file when you open it. There is no tenant-wide crawl and no third-party copy of every document. On tenants that require it, an administrator grants the read-only permissions once; after that, each person works within their own access.

Your files stay in your account.

Content lives behind row-level security in our UK (eu-west-2) Supabase region - your content stays scoped to your account. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers we use; we never fine-tune models on user content.

FAQ

Common questions about Sidenote for SharePoint & OneDrive.

Each person signs in to Microsoft themselves and grants Sidenote read-only access to the files they open. On most tenants that's all it takes. On locked-down Microsoft 365 tenants that disable user consent, an administrator may need to approve the read-only Graph permissions once for the organization: a standard one-time consent, not an app to deploy into SharePoint.
Delegated, read-only Microsoft Graph access to the files and sites you can already see, scoped to your own account. Sidenote reads a file only when you open it. There's no write access, and no background sync of your tenant.
Yes: anything your own Microsoft account can open. SharePoint document libraries, OneDrive files, and SharePoint site pages all work. If your account can't open it, neither can Sidenote; permissions stay exactly where Microsoft 365 put them.
Word documents, PDFs and PowerPoint decks (including speaker notes), plus SharePoint site pages. Excel is intentionally not supported: chatting over a flattened grid of numbers invites confidently wrong answers, which is the opposite of what Sidenote is for.
No. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers Sidenote uses, and Sidenote never fine-tunes models on user content. Files are used only to answer your own questions, stored in a UK (eu-west-2) region with row-level security isolating every account.
Copilot is Microsoft's own AI, sold as a per-user license and operated inside Microsoft 365. Sidenote is a lightweight per-user extension that works on SharePoint and OneDrive without a Copilot license (and across everything else you read too), grounding each answer in a citation you can click to the source passage. The two can coexist.
Try it on your files

Make SharePoint answer back.

Add Sidenote to your browser, sign in with Microsoft read-only, open a file, and ask. No Copilot license. Free tier forever, opt-in 7-day Pro trial, no card required.

Delegated read-only Graph access · Works with SharePoint Online & OneDrive