As a small business owner, presentations are a big part of my life. It’s something I have to make every few days for pitch decks, reports, and more.
But here’s the thing. Making presentations is tiring. While the goal is to get information across, making a good presentation has many other elements, including design.
This takes time and effort, and a lot of working around the various tools provided by PowerPoint.
You might think that the brunt of the work is the information gathering, but at least for me, it’s putting it together in visual form. It’s time-consuming and annoying.
So when I heard about NotebookLM’s new AI-accelerated presentation building tool, I knew I had to give it a try.
I’m not new to NotebookLM. I use it practically daily as a research tool, a place to dump information about topics I’m researching, and even to ideate angles based on my own research.
But recently, Google has added the ability to generate slide decks from your own notes.
NotebookLM isn’t the first tool to offer this, but I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of adding my privileged information to the public cloud.
However, NotebookLM differs in that it works on your own data.
Moreover, AI presentations fall into two categories. Either these presentations look great but butcher the messaging, or they get the content right but fail to nail the design.
NotebookLM, which focuses on using only the information you give it, manages to get both right.
Now that I’ve been using it for a couple of days, I can confirm that there’s very little reason for me to go back to PowerPoint.
NotebookLM presents a different way of thinking about presentations
Information is the source of truth
Working with NotebookLM for making presentations represents a big shift in your thinking process.
Unlike PowerPoint, where you are working both with presentation designs and the actual material simultaneously, NotebookLM frees up your thinking to focus just on your notes, PDFs, articles, and perhaps an outline.
When you ask NotebookLM to create a slide deck, it only works on the data inside your notebook instead of researching the broader internet or inventing content.
It’s a huge distinction when it comes to making a presentation and changes everything.
Traditional presentation tools assume that making the presentation is the primary objective. And while that’s true, at the end of the day, the goal is to convey information.
NotebookLM changes that perspective by making the information the source of truth, and the actual deck is just a representation of it.
In practice, this means that you can focus on your research without worrying about things like presentation structure and design.
Put all your notes together in one place and then ask NotebookLM to generate a deck.
The quality of output is surprisingly good and usually mirrors how I’d have arranged the deck myself. That makes sense since it follows my trail of thought and how I’ve structured my notes.
This approach also ensures that your data is well represented.
When you are making a presentation manually, the onus is on you to get the framing right and ensure you’ve added everything in.
Anyone who has made a presentation knows that things can and do slip through the gaps.
When NotebookLM makes the presentation, it pretty much guarantees that all primary talking points are represented.
Plus, there are the obvious benefits of saving you time and effort.
NotebookLM isn’t perfect, but it’s much faster than starting from scratch
I’ve tried a bunch of AI-powered presentation tools and none of them managed to stick to the landing.
Most of them, in my experience, focus too much on impressive designs rather than accuracy or information density.
That information constraint by not allowing NotebookLM to run amok using internet-based sources also means that it is more focused on clarity than creating a deck from scratch.
It also adds to the trust signal. Your presentation is only going to be as good or bad as the data and content you give it.
This means that you can’t just expect it to make a presentation out of the blue. Without the data you give it, there is no presentation.
On that note, NotebookLM does a surprisingly good job of maintaining tonality. That makes sense since it is picking up the source of true information from your writing and data.
I’ve found it to be an excellent productivity multiplier compared to working with PowerPoint.
With the latter, even if you start with a solid set of notes, you have to work around fitting things within templates. That can hamper your sentence structures, or even require you to break slides.
But all that said, the output isn’t perfect here. You’ll still need to review the deck before just emailing it across.
It’s not necessarily presentation ready off the bat, but even as a way to speed up things, NotebookLM does an excellent job.
Most presentations don’t need PowerPoint anymore
NotebookLM’s slide deck tool isn’t going to replace PowerPoint for every use case. However, it doesn’t need to.
PowerPoint is still useful where you need precise control or complex layouts.
But for the majority of presentations where you’re just putting data in a more visually interesting format, you’ll be surprised to see how well NotebookLM performs.
