I had a board presentation due and a pile of source material: earnings transcripts, internal memos, a few analyst reports, but no slides. I'd been meaning to try NotebookLM for something beyond casual research, so I decided to use it as my starting point for building the deck. ## The setup I uploaded six documents into a new NotebookLM notebook: two quarterly earnings transcripts from comparable companies, our internal strategy memo, a market sizing report, and two analyst notes on industry trends. About 80 pages of material total. NotebookLM indexed everything and generated an initial summary, which was a decent orientation but not what I needed. ## Getting to a slide structure The key prompt that unlocked the workflow was this: "Based on these sources, outline a 12-slide board presentation that covers market context, our competitive position, financial performance, and strategic priorities. For each slide, suggest a title and three supporting points with source citations." NotebookLM came back with a solid outline. Not perfect: it over-indexed on the earnings transcripts and under-weighted our internal memo, but it gave me a skeleton I could work with. I spent about ten minutes rearranging slides and rebalancing the emphasis. ## What worked well The citation feature is the real strength. Every supporting point links back to a specific passage in the source material. When my CFO asks "where did this market size number come from?" I can trace it back to the exact page. That traceability is something I'd normally spend time building manually with footnotes. The summarization quality was also strong. NotebookLM distilled a dense 20-page analyst report into three bullet points that captured the core argument. I made minor wording changes, but the substance was right. ## What didn't work NotebookLM doesn't output slides directly: it gives you structured text. I still had to take that text into PowerPoint and build the actual deck. The formatting, visual hierarchy, and chart placement were all manual. If you're hoping for an end-to-end "documents to deck" pipeline, this isn't it yet. It also struggled with synthesis across sources. When I asked it to compare our strategy against competitor moves mentioned in the transcripts, the output was surface-level. It pulled relevant quotes from each source but didn't really connect the dots. I had to write that connective tissue myself. ## When to use this vs. other tools I'd reach for NotebookLM when I have a lot of source material and need to build a structured narrative from it. The grounded citations are the differentiator: no other tool I've tried does that as cleanly. For a quick deck from a single document or from my own outline, I'd just use Copilot in PowerPoint or even start from scratch. The sweet spot for NotebookLM is synthesis from multiple sources with traceability. The final deck took me about two hours, compared to the four or five it would normally take. Most of the time savings came from not having to re-read all the source material to find the right supporting points. NotebookLM had already surfaced them. --- Related: [[signal/NotebookLM for Analysts|NotebookLM for analysts]] ← [[Lab|Back to /lab]]