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Google gives Gemini a boost in Sheets and a cool trick in NotebookLM

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Working with Google Gemini in Sheets.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Google is expanding Gemini integration within its Workspace suite and has announced a couple of new tricks for its underrated NotebookLM tool. The first in line is the ability to create structured tables in Google Sheets with text prompts.

So far, all tables created by the AI were served in plain text with only bold highlights for the headers. Needless to say, they looked drab and boring, lacking any character at all. There was no text formatting or stylistic edits to the cell contents.

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Now, Google has updated the “Create a table” preset in the Gemini sidebar in Sheets. On tapping it, users can conveniently substitute the core input terms and get a structured table with colorful highlights, dropdown options, and shaded cells in a few seconds.

New structured table format in Google Sheets for Gemini.
Google

According to Google, the facility will be available to “Workspace customers with Gemini Business, Enterprise, Education, Education Premium add-ons and users with the Google One AI Premium subscription.”

It seems the rollout is focused on business and enterprise customers first. Presently, those with access to Gemini Advanced courtesy of a Google One AI Premium subscription may not yet be able to create structured tables in Google Sheets.

An underrated gem gets better

The more impressive set of updates has been reserved for NotebookLM, the AI-powered note-taking app that also doubles as a research assistant. It can now analyze YouTube videos using a simple URL copy-paste and break down the contents in whichever form you’d like to view them.

NotebookLM providing summary of YouTube videos.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

You can further ask follow-up questions based on the topic-based breakdown offered by NotebookLM, complete with clickable links to the specific point in the video. After trying it on a few videos of varying durations, it seems to work flawlessly, even picking up details from the relatively shorter chapters in a YouTube video.

Another cool feature that will be immensely convenient for journalists, researchers, and students is the ability to search across an audio file’s transcription for specific information.

NotebookLM summary of a YouTube video.
Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Furthermore, NotebookLM has also gained the ability to transform audio recordings, handwritten notes, and lecture slides into study guides. Finally, we have a sharing update for Audio Overviews, which are essentially podcast-style audio versions of user-uploaded text files like PDFs.

Up until now, you could only generate these overviews with a single click. Now, they can also be shared directly using a custom URL. For folks seeking more versatility, they can also import Docs, Slides, and website links, or simply copy-paste text and get the analysis done by the underlying Gemini 1.5 model.

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Nadeem Sarwar
Nadeem Sarwar
Contributor
Nadeem is a tech journalist who started reading about cool smartphone tech out of curiosity and soon started writing…
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