NotebookLM: 10 Tips That Separate the Clickers From the Power Users

So you’ve heard of NotebookLM. Maybe you even tried it. You uploaded a document, asked it a question, it answered, and you thought “okay, cool” — and then went back to doing things the old way.

First of all, same. Second of all, you’re leaving an enormous amount on the table.

NotebookLM is one of those tools that looks simple on the surface and then turns out to have an entire underground city beneath it. The tips below are what separate people who use it occasionally from people who’ve quietly restructured their entire workflow around it. Ranked, because everything is better when it’s ranked.

Let’s go.

Before Anything Else: Why NotebookLM Is Different

Quick reminder, because it matters for everything that follows.

Most AI tools work like a very well-read person: they know a lot of general stuff, and they answer from that general knowledge. The problem? Sometimes they make things up. Confidently. With a straight face. It’s called “hallucination” and it’s the AI equivalent of that colleague who always sounds certain and is occasionally completely wrong.

NotebookLM works differently. It only answers from the documents you give it. Nothing else. It’s not browsing the internet, it’s not drawing on general knowledge — it’s reading your stuff and synthesizing your stuff. Every answer comes with a citation, which you can click to verify. Every. Single. One.

This is not a limitation. This is the whole point. And once you internalize that, these tips will make a lot more sense.

Tip #1: One Notebook, One Topic. No Exceptions.

This sounds boring. It is also the most important thing in this article.

The temptation is to create one giant notebook and throw everything into it — all your projects, all your documents, all your research. It feels organized. It is not organized. It’s a junk drawer with a label on it.

When you mix unrelated content in a single notebook, the AI’s ability to find connections and surface relevant information gets diluted. It’s like asking a very smart person to think about marketing strategy, project timelines, HR policy, and last year’s invoices all at the same time. Even they’d look at you funny.

The fix is simple: one notebook per project, per topic, per purpose. A “Marketing Research” notebook. A “Client X Project” notebook. A “Competitor Analysis” notebook. Each one becomes a focused little expert on exactly that thing and nothing else. The results are dramatically better.

Input discipline. That’s the whole tip.

Tip #2: The Note-to-Source Loop (a.k.a. the Recursive Brain Trick)

This one is a little mind-bending but very worth it.

Here’s the problem: when you have 10 raw documents in a notebook, there’s a lot of noise. Repetition, tangents, conflicting info, irrelevant sections. The AI does its best, but it’s working with messy material.

Here’s the fix: ask NotebookLM to synthesize all of it into one clean, structured note first. A comparison table, a summary document, a structured overview — whatever fits your purpose. Then take that note, clean it up manually if needed, and re-upload it as the only source in the notebook. Deselect all the originals.

Now the AI is working from a clean, verified, “gold standard” document you’ve curated yourself. The Audio Overviews it generates will be sharper. The slide decks will be more focused. The answers will be cleaner.

You’re essentially using the AI to make better raw material for the AI. Recursive, slightly philosophical, extremely useful.

Tip #3: Custom Instructions — All 10,000 Characters of Them

NotebookLM lets you set custom instructions for how the AI should behave in your notebook. Think of it as a permanent system prompt — a briefing you give the AI before every single conversation.

NotebookLM recently expanded this to 10,000 characters (that’s a lot of characters), which means you can now write genuinely detailed instructions. Not just “be formal” — but an entire persona, a role, a set of constraints, a preferred output format, the works.

Power users keep a “persona library” and paste in different ones depending on the task:

The Socratic Coach — doesn’t give you answers, asks you questions about the material so you actually have to think (and retain things)
The Senior Strategy Consultant — cuts straight to SWOT analysis, actionable recommendations, and executive-level framing
The Devil’s Advocate — specifically looks for holes in your argument, contradictions in the data, and reasons your plan might fail

That last one, by the way, is genuinely useful before any big presentation or proposal. Better to hear the problems from your AI than from your client.

Tip #4: Deep Research for the Gaps in Your Own Knowledge

Your internal documents are great, but they don’t know what happened last month. They don’t know what your competitor just announced. They don’t know the regulatory change that was published last week.

NotebookLM has a Deep Research mode that goes out and browses live websites to fill those gaps. You give it a question, it does the legwork across hundreds of sources and comes back with a cited report. You then import that report as a source into your notebook.

The result is a hybrid knowledge base: your internal documents plus the current state of the world, all in one place, all queryable. It’s the difference between working with a snapshot and working with a live picture.

Tip #5: Stop Generating One Audio Overview and Walking Away

The Audio Overview feature — where NotebookLM generates a podcast with two AI hosts discussing your documents — has, remarkably, been used by over 10 million people a month. Which means most of those people generated it once, listened passively, and called it done.

Don’t do that.

The actual power move: customize the prompt before you generate. You can tell the hosts what to focus on, what tone to take, what angle to explore. “Focus on the financial implications.” “Take a more skeptical tone.” “Debate the two main approaches and don’t pick a winner.”

Then generate multiple episodes from the same material, each exploring a different angle. You now have a mini podcast series about your own documents, which is either very cool or very weird, depending on your personality.

And in Interactive Mode, you can join the conversation yourself. Interrupt the hosts. Ask them to go deeper on a specific point. Act as a guest on your own podcast about your own meeting notes. Honestly? We live in remarkable times.

Tip #6: Query Across Notebooks (The Second Brain Move)

For a while, the biggest frustration with NotebookLM was that notebooks were silos. Your Marketing notebook couldn’t talk to your Finance notebook. You had multiple specialized experts who didn’t know each other existed.

That changed. You can now connect multiple notebooks through the Gemini app and query across all of them at once. So when the strategic question requires both the marketing data and the financial data, you don’t have to jump between two notebooks and manually connect the dots yourself.

This is what people mean when they talk about a “second brain.” Not one massive document dump — a network of specialized, focused notebooks that can be interrogated together when needed.

Tip #7: Ask It What’s Missing (The Source Gap Prompt)

Most people use NotebookLM as a summarizer. Summarize this. Explain that. What are the key points?

Useful. But not the most powerful thing you can do.

The most powerful prompt in the advanced user toolkit is the Source Gap prompt: ask the AI to tell you what’s not in the documents. What’s missing. What assumptions are unproven. Where the sources contradict each other. What questions the material raises but doesn’t answer.

You’re asking it to be an auditor, not a summarizer. And auditors find the things that matter — the gaps, the blind spots, the weak links in the argument. For market research, strategic planning, or any document where the stakes are high, this is invaluable.

“What important context is not covered in these documents?” is one of the most useful prompts you will ever type.

Tip #8: Transcribe Everything. Seriously, Everything.

NotebookLM supports audio and video uploads (YouTube links, MP4 files, MP3 recordings), and it will transcribe and analyze them just like text documents.

Think about what that means. Call recordings. Client interviews. Conference presentations you attended. Internal webinars. That hour-long product review meeting where someone promised to send the notes and never did.

All of it becomes searchable, queryable, and summarizable. You can turn a recorded client call into structured notes, FAQs, or a follow-up email in minutes. A recorded training session becomes a searchable knowledge base. A YouTube tutorial on a tool you’re learning becomes source material you can interrogate.

Third-party transcription services cost money and still give you a wall of text you have to process yourself. NotebookLM transcribes it and puts it directly into an environment where you can ask questions about it. That’s a different category of useful.

Tip #9: Revise Your Slides Like a Demanding Art Director

NotebookLM can generate slide decks directly from your source material. One click, full deck, done. Which is impressive enough on its own.

But the real move is what you do after. Once the deck is generated, you can go into the chat and tell it to revise specific slides. “Redo slide 4 to focus on the executive summary.” “Make slide 7 more visual and less text-heavy.” “The intro slide needs to start with the problem, not the solution.”

You’re essentially art-directing an AI slide designer who doesn’t take things personally and never says “but I thought we agreed on this layout.” Just iterate until it’s right, then export to PPTX and polish the final version yourself.

It won’t replace a good designer for anything that needs to look genuinely beautiful. But for an internal strategy presentation at 9am on a Tuesday? It’ll get you there.

Tip #10: Use the Citations to Navigate, Not Just to Verify

Every answer NotebookLM gives you includes clickable footnote-style citations linking directly to the source passage. Most people click them occasionally, to check if the AI got it right.

Power users click them constantly — not to verify, but to navigate.

Got a 500-page document? Don’t use Ctrl+F and hope for the best. Ask NotebookLM a question about the topic you need, and click the citation. You’ve just jumped directly to the relevant section using semantic search. The chat panel becomes a high-speed navigation interface for dense material.

For anyone who works with long contracts, technical documentation, lengthy reports, or academic papers, this alone is worth the price of entry. (Which, for the free tier, is zero. So.)

Bonus: The Three-Tool Chain That Power Users Actually Use

Here’s a workflow that’s become increasingly popular among people who’ve fully leaned into AI-assisted research:

Step 1 — Perplexity for initial web sourcing. It’s great at finding high-quality, current URLs on a topic quickly.

Step 2 — NotebookLM for deep, grounded analysis. Import those URLs, cross-reference with your internal documents, generate structured notes and synthesis.

Step 3 — ChatGPT or Claude for creative output. Take the refined synthesis from NotebookLM and move it to a more creatively fluent model for drafting, writing, or ideation.

Each tool does what it’s best at. Perplexity searches. NotebookLM synthesizes accurately. Claude or ChatGPT writes fluidly. Together, they cover the full research-to-output pipeline without any single tool having to be great at everything.

The Bottom Line (Again, But With More Conviction This Time)

NotebookLM is not a chatbot. It’s not a search engine. It’s not a note-taking app.

It’s a precision research environment that happens to also generate podcasts, slide decks, mind maps, and video summaries from your documents. Used casually, it’s a useful time-saver. Used strategically — with focused notebooks, custom personas, recursive refinement, and the right prompts — it’s genuinely a different way of working with information.

The tips above aren’t tricks. They’re a framework. Start with Tip #1 (notebook discipline), layer in the others as they become relevant to your work, and don’t try to implement all ten in the first week. You’ll lose your mind. Or at least your enthusiasm.

Pick one. Try it. See what changes.

The 500-page document isn’t going to read itself. But NotebookLM will, and it’ll tell you exactly what’s in it, what’s missing, and what you should probably do about it.

Shay Stibelman is a digital marketing consultant based in Milan, Italy. He helps businesses work smarter with the digital tools they already have — or the ones they really should have by now.

Microsoft Office Just Got a Brain. Here’s What That Means For You.

Let’s be honest for a second.

You’ve been using Microsoft Office for years. Maybe decades. You know how to bold text. You know Ctrl+Z is undo and you use it approximately 400 times a day. You’ve survived Excel formulas that looked like ancient Sanskrit, PowerPoint transitions that belonged in a 2003 corporate fever dream, and Word documents that somehow changed formatting by themselves in the middle of the night.

You’ve been through a lot together, you and Office.

And now, Microsoft has added AI to the whole thing. It’s called Copilot, and it lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams — basically everywhere you already spend your working hours. Which is everywhere.

So what does that actually mean for you? Good question. Let’s get into it.

First, the Obvious Question: Do I Need to Learn Something New?

Sort of, but not really.

The beauty of Copilot — and AI assistants in general when they’re baked into tools you already use — is that you’re not learning a new interface. You’re not switching apps. You’re not watching a three-part tutorial series on YouTube at 1.5x speed while eating lunch.

You’re just working in the same apps you’ve always used, except now there’s a little AI assistant sitting in the sidebar going “psst. I can help with that.”

The learning curve is: know what to ask. That’s it. And we’re going to cover exactly that.

Word: Your New Writing Partner Who Never Sighs at Your Drafts

Let’s start with Word, because almost everyone uses it and almost everyone has a complicated relationship with the blank page.

Drafting from scratch? Don’t. Describe what you need and let Copilot write a first draft. Not because you’re lazy — because a first draft to react to is always faster than a first draft from nothing. You’ll edit it, reshape it, make it yours. But you’re not starting from zero, and that matters more than people admit.

Rewriting existing content? Select any paragraph, right-click, and ask Copilot to make it shorter, more formal, more casual, or just “better.” It’s surprisingly good at adjusting tone. Handy for when you need to send the same information to your CEO and to a client and they absolutely cannot sound identical.

Summarizing long documents? Ask Copilot to summarize whatever’s open. It reads the whole thing and gives you the key points. This is particularly useful when someone sends you a 20-page document with the note “let me know your thoughts by EOD” at 4:47pm.

The secret move: Ask it to improve your writing, not just change it. There’s a difference between “make this shorter” and “make this clearer and more direct.” Try both. See what happens.

Excel: Finally, Formulas in Human Language

Okay. Excel formulas. Let’s talk.

I love Excel. I also know that a non-trivial percentage of the working population opens a cell, starts typing a formula, makes one small error, and then stares at a #REF! error for 20 minutes while slowly questioning their life choices.

With Copilot in Excel, you can now describe what you want in plain English and it will write the formula for you.

“Show me the total sales for Q3 where the region is ‘North’.” “Calculate the average time between order date and delivery date.” “Flag any rows where the value in column C is more than 20% higher than the previous row.”

It writes the formula. You paste it in. It works. You feel like a genius. Nobody has to know.

But it goes further than formulas. You can ask Copilot to:

Spot trends in your data — “What patterns do you see in this dataset?”
Suggest charts — “What’s the best way to visualize this data?”
Clean up messy data — ask it to identify duplicates, inconsistencies, or blank cells
Generate new columns based on logic — “Add a column that categorizes sales as High, Medium or Low based on value”

The spreadsheet isn’t going to build itself. But with Copilot, it’s getting a lot closer.

The secret move: Don’t just ask it to do things. Ask it to explain things. If you’ve inherited a spreadsheet full of formulas someone else wrote (we’ve all been there, and we’ve all had feelings about it), ask Copilot to explain what each formula does. Instant clarity. No archaeology required.

PowerPoint: Slides From Nothing, In Seconds

PowerPoint has a special place in the circle of office suffering. There is nothing quite like the experience of being told you need to “put together a quick presentation” — which, in the history of work, has never once been quick.

Copilot can now generate an entire presentation from a prompt. Or, better yet, from a Word document you’ve already written. You feed it the content, tell it roughly what you need, and it builds slides — with layouts, titles, bullet points, and even suggested images.

Is it perfect? No. Will you need to tweak it? Yes. Will it still save you 45 minutes of dragging text boxes around and trying to remember whether your brand color is #0050A0 or #0052A3? Absolutely.

You can also use it to:

Summarize a presentation that someone sent you (because sometimes you receive a 40-slide deck and need to understand it in 3 minutes)
Add a new slide on a specific topic without breaking the existing formatting
Rewrite speaker notes so they actually sound like something a human would say out loud, rather than a bullet-pointed anxiety spiral

The secret move: After generating slides, ask Copilot: “What’s missing from this presentation?” It will often flag gaps in logic, missing sections, or points that need more supporting data. It’s like having a second pair of eyes that’s read the brief and isn’t being polite about it.

Outlook: Because Email is Still Somehow the Core of Everything

Email. The immortal, indestructible, unstoppable communication format that was supposed to die approximately fifteen times and never did.

Copilot in Outlook does a few things that will make your inbox slightly less of a horror show.

Email summaries: Long email thread with 24 replies and you have no idea what’s happening? Ask Copilot to summarize it. It pulls out the key decisions, open questions, and action items. You’re caught up in 30 seconds. You’re welcome.

Draft replies: You can highlight an email and ask Copilot to draft a reply for you. Give it the key point you want to make and the tone you want to strike, and it handles the rest. This is especially useful for emails you’ve been putting off because they require a delicate touch (read: the ones you’ve had sitting in your inbox for four days with a little mental sticky note that says “ugh”).

Coaching mode: There’s a feature that reviews your draft before you send it and gives feedback on tone, clarity, and whether it might land the wrong way. Think of it as a friend who reads your passive-aggressive email before you send it and gently says “maybe don’t.”

The secret move: Use Copilot to schedule follow-ups. Ask it to draft a follow-up email to send in three days if you haven’t heard back. Copy it into a draft, schedule the send. Never forget a follow-up again. Never lose a deal because it fell through a crack. Very satisfying.

Teams: The Meeting Took Two Hours and You Need It to Be Four Bullet Points

Teams has arguably the most dramatic AI upgrade of the whole suite.

Copilot in Teams can transcribe your meetings in real time, take notes, summarize the discussion, and generate a list of action items — all automatically, while you’re actually present in the meeting and paying attention like a normal human being.

After the meeting, you can ask it things like:

“What did we decide about the budget?”
“Were there any open questions that didn’t get resolved?”
“What did Marco say about the timeline?” (Perfect for when Marco is a fast talker and you lost the thread somewhere around minute 47.)

You can even ask it to catch you up if you joined a meeting late. Which, you know. Happens sometimes. To some of us. More than we’d like to admit.

The secret move: At the end of a meeting, before you hang up, ask Copilot to generate a recap you can paste directly into an email to all attendees. Meeting summary + action items + owners + deadlines, ready to send. Your team will think you’ve become incredibly organized. You have not. You’ve become incredibly smart about using tools.

The Stuff That Works Across All of Them

A few principles that apply no matter which Office app you’re in:

Be specific about tone. “Formal” and “professional” are not the same thing. “Casual” and “friendly” are not the same thing. Tell it exactly what register you need.

Give it context. The more it knows about the situation, the better the output. “Write an email” is a weak prompt. “Write an email to a long-term client explaining a 2-week delay on their project, keeping the tone reassuring and taking responsibility without being dramatic” is a great prompt.

Iterate, don’t regenerate. If the first output isn’t quite right, don’t just click “regenerate” and hope for different results. Tell it specifically what to change. “Make the introduction shorter.” “The second paragraph is too formal.” “Add a sentence acknowledging the inconvenience.” You’ll get there faster.

Use it to think, not just to produce. Ask it questions. “What am I missing here?” “Is there a better way to structure this?” “What objections might someone have to this proposal?” AI is a thinking partner, not just a text generator.

Coming Up: The Deep Dives

This is the overview — the “here’s what’s possible” article. But we’re just getting started.

In the coming articles, I’ll be going deep on each of these apps individually: specific features, real use cases, the tricks that actually save time versus the ones that look impressive in demos and are useless in real life. We’ll also look at specific job roles and workflows — what AI in Office looks like for someone in finance versus someone in marketing versus someone who just wants to get through their inbox and go home on time.

So bookmark this. Or don’t — just Google “Shay AI Office” in three weeks and it’ll probably come up. (That’s SEO confidence right there.)

Pro Tip: The Sidebar Is Your Secret Weapon

Here’s something that most people overlook entirely, and it’s kind of mind-blowing once you start using it.

In Microsoft 365 apps, Copilot lives in a sidebar — a persistent panel on the right side of your screen that you can open at any time, in any document, and just… talk to. You don’t have to use the inline features. You don’t have to right-click or navigate menus. The sidebar is just there, ready, like a very competent colleague who never leaves their desk.

You can have it summarize what you’re working on, ask it questions about the document, get it to generate something new, or just think out loud with it while you work.

And if you’re in the Google Workspace universe instead — Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail — the same principle applies with Gemini in the sidebar. Google has their own version of this, and with Gems (custom AI personas you can configure for specific tasks), you can set up a sidebar assistant that’s already tuned for your specific workflow before you even open a document.

Whether it’s Copilot or Gemini, the sidebar is where the real day-to-day magic happens — not in flashy demos, but in the quiet five seconds where you ask a quick question and get back exactly what you needed.

I’m going to write a whole dedicated article about using the sidebar effectively — for both Microsoft and Google — including how to set up Gemini Gems for specific roles and workflows. It’s worth its own deep dive. Stay tuned.

Shay Stibelman is a digital marketing consultant based in Milan, Italy. He helps small and medium businesses get their digital act together — websites, strategy, tools, and the occasional strongly-worded opinion about fonts in PowerPoint presentations.