Summary
- NotebookLM streamlines researching and presenting tasks, saving time for professionals.
- The tool condenses PowerPoint presentations into digestible talking points for easy summarization.
- By reverse engineering summaries, users improve PowerPoint accuracy and use NotebookLM for fact-checking.
NotebookLM has become a staple tool in my everyday working life. It has made me rethink how I go about researching, studying, and preparing for different aspects of my professional career. It’s not a perfect tool, but it helps me save time during work-intensive processes by summarizing and condensing. NotebookLM is an ideal tool for me because I have to do a lot of researching and presenting.
I frequently have to use PowerPoint presentations to show the progress of my team’s performance. Because of that, I have gotten used to building slide decks one by one, as the data changes each month. While I’ve gotten better at making each PowerPoint, it’s still tedious work. Plus, once I’m done crafting the slides, I have to make a presentation out of them.
This sometimes takes the most amount of time, putting them into more efficient and digestible sections to be able to present them. Essentially, sometimes I need a short PowerPoint to summarize the larger PowerPoint. That’s where NotebookLM has proven most valuable.
How to upload PowerPoint slides to NotebookLM
There isn’t a dedicated integration
The PowerPoint presentation I’ve included here was created by me for this article. It is not a real PowerPoint deck.
When you’re uploading source material to NotebookLM, you can drop in files like PDFs, Google Drive documents, YouTube links, websites, and more. You can tell the AI which sources to use for pulling answers or generating summaries, which makes it incredibly helpful for studying.
That said, there’s no direct integration for PowerPoint decks. You have two options: save your finished PowerPoint as a PDF and upload that to NotebookLM, or convert the deck to Google Slides and upload it from there.
Using NotebookLM to understand your PowerPoint slides
Let it do the dirty work for you
The best use of NotebookLM for PowerPoint, in my opinion, is having it summarize the presentation for you. It can take a 50-slide deck and condense it into digestible talking points if you need to present on it. This is how I use the integration each month: I create the slides, export them as a PDF, and upload that to NotebookLM to generate talking points.
I tend to keep my PowerPoints mostly visual (images and text) so the tool can read and interpret them more easily. If the presentation includes deeper content or richer media, it may take a bit more time to process. But the end result is generally the same. Once I have the talking points, I can prompt the AI further to gain more insights from the data.
NotebookLM’s other features — like Mind Map, Audio Overviews, and note-taking from summaries — are also incredibly useful. They help me extract broader context from my PowerPoint content. The Mind Map tool, in particular, lets me break the information into categories, and I’ve even used its diagrams in my presentations to visualize how the data branches out. While I haven’t yet used Audio Overviews during a presentation, I see it as a great prep tool. I’ve considered generating an Audio Overview beforehand and listening to the AI-generated clips on my way to present, just to reinforce my understanding.
How NotebookLM helps me make better PowerPoints
I take what they give me and then reverse-engineer it all
After reading the summary that NotebookLM provides me from my PowerPoint, I will ask it questions such as “give me averages for months A-Z,” or “tell me the trajectory that growth is on for the three months depicted.” If it can give me accurate answers, I know the PowerPoint is accurate. If it gets confused, or it doesn’t provide me with correct data, I go back into the PowerPoint and change how it reads and how it looks. I basically use NotebookLM as a fact-checking tool for my PowerPoint.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how effective it’s been.
If the smart AI from Google is unable to understand my PowerPoint, it may not be clear enough. This is crucial when I’m talking about minute details and data points because, while they may be small, they are important for the work my company does. NotebookLM can get as deep as I need and, if it can’t, then I have to make changes. It’s proven to be a valuable asset when I’m preparing for meetings. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how effective it’s been, and I’m excited to see how I can utilize it more in the future.
