A crucial data analysis feature is coming to NotebookLM very soon

NotebookLM is easily one of Google’s most highly cherished AI tools, with fewer haters than any other of Google’s apps. It lets you research and process data from numerous different sources and convert verbose formats into digestible chunks, or even AI-generated podcasts and video essays. With an upcoming update, Google is set to improve file support for free users.

Google Drive integration already lets you import files from Docs and Slides as sources to NotebookLM. But the research tool lacks support for Google Sheets (or .XLS and .XLSX files) in the free tier. Thankfully, if you’ve been yearning for the option to import your Sheets or Excel files to NotebookLM, Google may be bringing it to you soon.

The official NotebookLM handle confirmed this in response to a user’s request. While the official channel did not comment on an exact timeline for availability, it simply said the functionality is “coming very soon.”

Notably, Sheets support is available to NotebookLM Plus users. So, if you subscribe to Google AI Plus or AI Pro plans, you should be able to do it already. However, if you’re a free-tier user, you must convert the Sheets-compatible file to PDF, Google Docs (.DOC or .DOCX) format, or to a markdown file to use its data.

Then, the Sheets support should come in handy if you use NotebookLM to analyze data alongside researching from various sources.

The support could be useful alongside the recently added support for a longer context window and conversation history in NotebookLM that Google introduced earlier this week. In addition to storing your conversation history within the notebook, the tool now also lets you customize output with personalized conversation styles. This update follows NotebookLM’s previous update, which introduced creative styles for video overviews, enabling you to generate videos with anime-inspired graphics.