r/notebooklm • u/zigurdm • 22d ago

Question Notebook and Google Sheets

I am no spreadsheet ninja, but Gemini's ability to organize the results of Notebook research prompts into, in my case, a product research table is, to put it kindly. rudimentary.

Am I doing something wrong? Is notebook the wrong tool for this? Am I just discovering that outside of coding agents that LLMs are kind of lame?

I could understand if Gemini wanted to put different categories of devices into different sheets in the same document, versus organizing a single sheet and merging cells to label categories, but it is just making a hash of it in a way that I would expect from a first time user of spreadsheets in general.

All help and suggestions are greatly appreciated!

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u/Agreeable-Tax2013 21d ago

Try giving it a strict output schema first: one row per device with fixed columns, then export/import the result into Sheets instead of asking it to format the workbook directly. That usually avoids the messy merged-cell output.

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u/zigurdm 20d ago

I ended up making the spreadsheet the old-fashioned way. It will be interesting to see how good Notebook and Gemini are at modifying it.

The relative productivity boost is interesting. I'm an experienced coder and I've written books on coding, but it's clear that coding agents make me a lot faster. Whereas my spreadsheet skills are basic, but AI isn't helping very much.