NotebookLM Is To Words What Excel Is To Numbers

Everyone on the planet has heard of Microsoft Excel. It’s the world’s analytical infrastructure. Estimates are that 1,500,000,000 people use Excel. Users love it at least twice a day and typically have several spreadsheets open at the same time. It’s the go-to application for numeric analyses of all kinds. Though there have been some challengers, it’s as dominant as a tool can be.

NotebookLM? What’s that? At a recent meeting at my university, nearly all of the participants – all heavy Excel users – had never heard of it. No one knows how many users there are. Hardly anyone knows what it does – except for my students (I’ll return to that later).

So how in the world could anyone compare NotebookLM with Excel? Stay with me.

Excel

Microsoft romances about Excel: “somewhere in your data there’s a story … and Microsoft Excel helps you find it … it’s where you build spreadsheets to organize your data … to run calculations, automate tasks or handle large amounts of information … to how you … find summaries, trends and patterns, or get recommendations for charts and graphs to visualize everything.”

Gemini lists the tasks anyone can perform with Excel:

Data analysis: Excel can be used to perform calculations, statistical comparisons, and what-if analysis.

Data visualization: Excel can be used to create charts and graphs to help visualize and compare data.

Data organization: Excel can be used to group data into rows and columns, and then sort, filter, or add up the data.

Data tracking: Excel can be used to keep track of information, such as personal finances, fitness, or meal plans.

Calendar creation: Excel can be used to create calendars, such as content calendars, lesson plans, or seating charts.

Financial analysis: Excel is often used by accounting teams to create financial documents, such as balance sheets and budgets.

Data presentation: Excel can be used to present data efficiently.

Data formatting: Excel can be used to emphasize data using conditional formatting icons, color scales, and data bars.

NotebookLM

NotebookLM is a new Google application (the beta was released in July-2023) that manages data in some extraordinary ways. Google initially described it this way:

“NotebookLM is an experimental product designed to use the power and promise of language models paired with your existing content to gain critical insights, faster. Think of it as a virtual research assistant that can summarize facts, explain complex ideas, and brainstorm new connections – all based on the sources you select.”

Gemini – NotebookLM’s large language model (LLM) partner – explains what you can do with the application:

Summarize information: NotebookLM can summarize complex documents, generate key topics, and ask questions to help you understand the material.

Answer questions: You can ask NotebookLM questions about the documents you’ve uploaded. For example, you can ask it to create a glossary of key terms or summarize interactions between people.

Create personalized guides: NotebookLM can generate a personalized guide based on your sources.

Create podcasts: NotebookLM can generate realistic podcasts from documents.

Create study guides: NotebookLM can create study guides with short-answer questions and a glossary of important terms.

Create briefings: NotebookLM can create briefings from your sources.

Analyze sources: NotebookLM can analyze sources, such as email marketing funnels.

Brainstorm connections: NotebookLM can help you brainstorm new connections based on the sources you select.

As Gemini explains, “you can use NotebookLM with a variety of sources, including Google Docs, PDFs, Text files, Google Slides, Website URLs, Audio files, and YouTube links.”

NotebookLM Is To Words What Excel Is To Numbers

NotebookLM is as flexible with words as Excel is with numbers. In fact, the two applications work equally well at different ends of the analytical continuum. NotebookLM is designed to enable insights, concepts, ideas, brainstorming and collaboration in ways that are not dissimilar from how Excel enables insights, concepts, ideas, brainstorming and collaboration.

One application uses words and one uses numbers.

Is all this too early to call? All we can do is study the NotebookLM’s adoption curve. There’s every reason to predict that adoption will be steep: “Google’s NotebookLM, a note-taking platform powered by AI, has seen its own meteoric rise. Launched in July 2023, the service saw user growth of 300% in September and 201% in October.” But these numbers are from a zero adoption base. Time will tell if it’s a hit, but the prediction here is that it will.

Will NotebookLM accept Excel files the same way it accepts Google Docs, PDFs, Text files, Google Slides, Website URLs, Audio files and YouTube links? Not today, but stay tuned for a possible relationship.

Students Will Drive Early Adoption

My students have discovered NotebookLM. They use it every day. It’s tailor made for students who need to crunch large amounts of information as quickly and flexibly as possible. Gemini explains how students already use NotebookLM:

Summarizing research papers: Upload academic papers and ask NotebookLM to provide concise summaries highlighting key findings and arguments, saving time during study sessions.

Creating study guides: Generate practice questions, flashcards, and glossaries based on uploaded course materials to actively test comprehension.

Clarifying concepts: Ask questions about complex topics directly within the platform, receiving detailed explanations with source references.

Note-taking enhancement: Upload lecture notes and have NotebookLM identify key points, organize information and create structured outlines.

Brainstorming ideas: Use NotebookLM to generate potential research angles or project ideas by analyzing various sources and identifying connections.

Group collaboration: Share notes and materials within a NotebookLM project to facilitate discussion and identify common themes among group members.

Reviewing key terms: Quickly access definitions and explanations of important terminology from uploaded documents.

Preparing for presentations: Generate talking points and key arguments based on research materials for presentations.

But while students will drive early adoption, we can expect every content-driven profession to adopt the application, including the legal, healthcare, marketing and finance professions. Education is the test case. Others will follow.

Where All This Goes

NotebookLM is not alone. Others have discovered what the offspring of AI and document crunching can yield. Meta, for example, released NotebookLlama in November, an open source competitor to NotebookLM. There will no doubt be others. But NotebookLM will win this war in the same way that Excel won the war against Google Sheets, Apple Numbers and Zoho Sheet. NotebookLM’s quick adoption by students suggests how to penetrate a market. The Gemini-powered application has already added features with many more to come.

What’s important is the current and future collaboration capabilities and the ability to eventually API-connect to other content sources and applications. There’s also a thin line between what NotebookLM does today and what agentic AI will enable tomorrow, when the full force of generative AI is leveraged onto the application. NotebookLM will increasingly rely upon its AI connections for feature development: as the Google AI platform develops, so will NotebookLM.

We can also expect Excel to widen its group of AI friends for improved data analysis, predictive analytics, task automation, training, automated visualization and personalization with friends like Co-Pilot, Arcwise AI and conversational Excel. At some point in the not too distant future, NotebookLM and Excel AI will become friends. Co-Pilot and Gemini – and their agents – will enable a relationship that will endure, if not occasionally compete.