24/08/2026
Save time on the "where's that written down?" problem
Are you losing ten minutes a week hunting through a PDF for one clause. Your insurance excess, the supplier's minimum order, what the lease says about the car park.
By the end of this you'll have one place you can ask questions of your own paperwork in plain English, and get the answer with a link straight to the line it came from.
Gemini Notebook. Free at notebooklm.google. Worth knowing it used to be called NotebookLM, Google renamed it on 16 July 2026, so most of the tutorials you'll find still use the old name.
Next gather the documents you keep re-reading. Insurance policy, supplier agreements, the lease, your employee handbook, the procedures from a fortnight ago. Ten to twenty is plenty to start.
Make one notebook and upload the lot. PDFs, Word docs, Google Docs, even a web page URL. Drag and drop; there's nothing to configure.
Ask it the question you actually asked someone last week. Not a clever question, a real one. "What's our excess on a windscreen claim?" "How much notice does Baker's need for a bulk order?"
Click the citation. Every answer carries a little numbered link back to the exact passage in your document. Click it every time, especially early. This is the whole reason to use this tool rather than pasting into a chatbot.
Share the notebook with whoever asks you these questions. The value isn't you finding things faster. It's the three people who currently interrupt you finding them without you.
If you are on a personal Google account it's free. The free tier gives you 100 notebooks, 50 sources in each, and 50 questions a day, far more than this needs. If your business is on Google Workspace it's included in your plan at no extra cost, and you should use that one instead. Here's why that matters more than the price.
Two things, and the second is the one nobody mentions.
The obvious one: it only knows what you gave it. Ask about something in a document you didn't upload and you'll get a confident answer built from the wrong contract. If you update your insurance policy, upload the new one and delete the old one, otherwise it will happily quote you last year's excess with a citation to prove it.
The one worth reading twice: on a personal Google account, your uploaded documents aren't used to train Google's models, unless you click the thumbs up or thumbs down button. Feedback gets read by trained human reviewers (Google separates it from your account first). On Google Workspace, that exception doesn't exist: no human review, no training, even if you do click. So if you're uploading commercially sensitive contracts on a personal account, the practical rule is simple, don't press the feedback buttons. Better still, put it on the Workspace account.
The answer was always in the document. This just stops you being the search function.
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