How to · NotebookLM
Your chart file in NotebookLM
Google’s NotebookLM answers questions from documents you give it, and shows you the line each answer came from. That makes it the one place your whole file fits comfortably — and the one place you can check every claim against the file in a single click.
Why this one is different
The chat apps have a limit on how much they can hold in view at once. On a free plan that is somewhere around 27,000 to 32,000 tokens, and your Complete file is larger — so the assistant reads it in pieces, and can miss a connection between two parts of your chart that sit far apart.
NotebookLM caps a single source at 500,000 words. The Complete file is about 24,600. It is not close to the limit — it is using five per cent of it, with room for forty-nine more sources beside it.
And every answer is footnoted. Click the citation and you land on the passage it came from. That is the same discipline the file itself follows — every finding naming what it rests on — which makes the two fit together unusually well.
1Open NotebookLM and make a notebook
Go to notebooklm.google.com and sign in with a Google account. Free. Click Create new and name it something you will recognise — your own name is fine.
2Upload your chart file as a source
Click Add source and pick your
.mdfile. Markdown is a native format here — it is read as structure rather than flattened, which is why it lands more accurately than a PDF would.3Ask, and check the citation
Every answer carries a numbered citation. Click it and you are taken to the exact passage in your file that the answer came from.
4Add whatever else is about you
Journal exports, a therapist’s summary, another reading, notes you keep. Up to fifty sources in one notebook — and each answer tells you which one it came from.
Free, and the file is a native format here. Checked 15 September 2026.
What it is genuinely better at
- Looking something up. "What does my file say about the ninth house?" comes back with the passage attached.
- Checking a claim. If an answer surprises you, the citation is right there. No taking it on trust.
- Holding the whole chart at once. Questions that cross areas — how work and health interact, say — do not fall between two retrieved fragments.
- Reading your file alongside other things. This is the part nothing else does. Put your chart file next to a journal export and ask what they have in common.
What it will not do, and you should know this first
NotebookLM answers from sources. It does not take on the instructions inside your file the way ChatGPT or Claude do — so the opening questions, the settings panel, /astroconfig, the shortcuts and the gentler conversational shape are simply not there. It will answer what you asked, cite it, and stop.
So it is better at looking things up and worse atbeing read to. If you want the reading itself — the pacing, the questions back, the care with a hard placement — usea chat app. If you want to interrogate the file and check every answer, use this.
Plenty of people end up using both, for different questions. That is the sensible answer, not a fudge.
The free limits, and what they mean in practice
Fifty sources per notebook, a hundred notebooks, fifty chats a day, and 500,000 words or 200 MB per source. For one person reading their own chart, none of those is a ceiling you will meet — the chat limit is the only one worth noticing, and fifty questions a day is more than most people ask in a week.
Good first questions
- "What does this file say about how I work best? Quote the lines."
- "Which periods in the next five years does it flag, and what for?"
- "Where does this file contradict itself, or say something is uncertain?"
- "What does it say it cannot tell me?"
That third one is worth asking of any document you paid for. An honest file has uncertainties in it, and yours states them.
Using it with the Obsidian vault
They do different jobs and stack neatly. NotebookLM is where you ask and check; the vault is where you keep what you concluded and why. Ask in one, write the answer into the other — and note the citation, so future you can find the passage again.