Turning Work Documents into Training Material
You already have the material. It is a 60-page handbook, a folder of policy PDFs, last quarter's release notes, a recorded call with the person who knows how this actually works. What you do not have is a version of it that someone else can learn from in twenty minutes.
That is the job this page covers: take a document you already own and turn it into something teachable — an SOP someone follows, a short video they watch, a brief they skim, a quiz that proves it landed.
This is a workflow guide. Each tool has its own article; this page is about which ones to use, in what order, and why.
Start from the output, not the tool
The most common mistake is opening the tool you recognise instead of the one that matches the deliverable. Scholarly's New menu is built to prevent that — it is grouped by what you walk away with, not by technology:
| Group | What's in it | What you walk away with |
|---|---|---|
| Listen & watch | Podcast, video lecture, transcribe | Something people consume without reading — a narrated explainer, a commute-length episode, a clean transcript of a session |
| Present | Slides, infographic, mind map | Something you stand in front of, or a single visual someone grasps at a glance |
| Write | Report, SOP, case study, meeting notes, page, AI Document | A document someone reads, follows, or circulates |
| Research & data | Deep research, spreadsheet, timeline | An answer with citations, a structured dataset, a sequence of events |
Upload and Import from apps sit at the top of the same screen, so adding the source is the first thing you see. Underneath, one strip holds the study formats — flashcards, study guide, worksheet, story book — and the blank starts for a page, spreadsheet, flashcard deck, PDF, or folder.
Pick the row that matches how the material will be used. If people will be doing something, you want an SOP. If they need to understand something, you want a video lecture or a study guide. If you need to know whether it stuck, you want a quiz.
Four recipes that work
Each of these names a real source, a chain of artifacts, and the reason for that order. Every step draws from the same sources, so you never re-upload.
1. Onboarding a new hire
Source: the employee handbook, two or three policy PDFs, and a recorded screen-share of someone doing the job.
Chain: SOP → study guide → quiz.
Why that order: the SOP comes first because it forces the material into actions in sequence — the thing a handbook is worst at. Once the steps are settled, the study guide explains the reasoning behind them, and the quiz tells you whether the new hire actually absorbed the parts that matter. Build them in the other order and your study guide teaches a process you have not pinned down yet.
Upload the recording as a source alongside the documents. The expert's spoken asides — "we stopped doing it that way in March" — are usually the most valuable content you have, and they exist nowhere in the handbook.
2. Enablement for a shipping product
Source: release notes and the spec for each release.
Chain: a short video lecture per release → a one-page brief from AI Document.
Why that order: enablement fails on cadence, not on depth. A five-minute narrated walkthrough per release is watched; a 40-page quarterly deck is not. Make the video first, because it forces you to decide what actually changed for the customer, then generate the one-pager as the leave-behind the rep keeps open during a call.
Keep one video per release rather than one growing video. Small, dated artifacts age gracefully; a single monolith goes stale all at once.
3. Capturing an expert before they move on
Source: one recorded session — a walkthrough, an interview, a workshop.
Chain: transcript → lesson plan → worksheet → flashcard deck.
Why that order: the transcript is the asset. It is searchable, citable, and it is what every later artifact is grounded in — so make it first and keep it, even if nobody reads it end to end. The lesson plan turns an hour of unstructured talking into teachable segments with objectives and timing. The worksheet gives a learner something to do with each segment. The flashcards cover the handful of facts and definitions that have to be recalled rather than looked up.
Record straight into Scholarly, or upload audio you already have. See AI Meeting Notes.
4. Client and research work
Source: a stack of reports, filings, vendor documents, or published papers.
Chain: a cited research report → a case study.
Why that order: the research report does the reading and, crucially, carries the citations — so when a client asks "where did that number come from", the answer is one click away instead of an afternoon. The case study is then written from the report rather than from the raw stack, which is what keeps it short and keeps every claim traceable.
Case studies are one of the document types AI Document produces, alongside reports, briefs, timelines, and spreadsheets.
Get the source in first
Nothing here works better than the material you feed it. Before you open a create window, get the real source in.
- What you can upload: PDFs, Word (
.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx,.ppt), text and Markdown, images and photos of printed pages or whiteboards, audio files, spreadsheets and data files, and code. The full matrix is in Supported File Formats. - Links and videos: paste a web page or PDF URL, or a YouTube link — a recorded webinar, conference talk, or product demo becomes a source like any other. See YouTube Sources.
- Recordings: record a meeting or walkthrough in the browser, or upload existing audio. You get a transcript, a summary, and action items, and the recording can be a source for anything else. See AI Meeting Notes.
- Google Drive: pick specific files through Google's picker. See Connections.
How many sources one creation can combine
One shared limit applies across every creation tool:
| Plan | Sources per creation |
|---|---|
| Free | 1 |
| Premium | up to 10 |
| Laureate | up to 20 |
That is the number that decides whether "the handbook plus three policies plus the recording" is one artifact or four. See Plans and Limits.
Use page ranges on long PDFs
For a PDF, pick a page range in the create window. A 200-page handbook produces a vague study guide; chapter 4 of that handbook produces a sharp one. Narrowing the source is the single highest-return habit in this whole workflow — and it is faster than re-generating something that came out too shallow.
Make it sound like your organisation
Generic output is the reason most people stop using a tool like this. Customization Profiles are the fix: one saved profile carries reusable instructions ("plain language, no internal shorthand, British spelling, always name the owning team"), a preferred AI model, and a visual identity into every creation you start.
Three levels, in increasing order of leverage:
- Personal profile — yours, available in every create window.
- Project default — set a profile as a project's default and every chat and creation started there reuses it, without anyone picking it. See Projects.
- Team profile — a team admin publishes shared profiles from Team → AI profiles, and every member can apply them. One person sets the house style; everyone's decks, documents, and videos come out consistent.
Keep one job in one project
A project holds the sources, everything made from them, the chats about them, and the standing instructions — for one piece of work. "Onboarding", "Q3 enablement", "Acme client research."
Do this even for small jobs. The value shows up later: when you need to refresh the material in six months, everything you used is already in one place, with the instructions that produced it, and you are not reconstructing which four PDFs went into which video.
Hand it over
You have two ways to deliver, and they are good at different things.
- Share a link. Fastest, always current, works without an account if you make it public, and it tells you how many people opened it. Link sharing and PDF download are available on every plan. See Sharing and Collaboration.
- Export the file. When it has to live in your LMS, your intranet, or someone's inbox, export as Word, PowerPoint, or straight to Google Docs / Google Slides. Editable exports require a paid plan, and an export is a separate copy — editing it does not change the original, and the original's sharing settings are untouched. Not every type exports; the full matrix is in Exporting Your Work.
Keep it current
The advantage of generating from a source is that you can regenerate from it.
Regenerate rather than hand-edit. When the policy changes, replace the source document and generate the artifact again. If you have been editing the SOP by hand, those edits are lost the moment the underlying document moves — and you end up maintaining two versions of the truth. Let the source be the truth.
Schedule the refresh. On the last step of a create window, Schedule queues the creation for a specific day and time instead of starting it now. Point it at your review date — the quarter-end, the day after the policy committee meets — and the refreshed version is waiting for you. Scheduling is one-time, so schedule the next one when you pick up the last. See Scheduled Tasks.
Replace, do not accumulate. When a document is superseded, swap it out of the project rather than adding a second copy. Grounded output is only as good as what is in front of it, and two versions of a policy produce answers that split the difference.
Doing this for a team
Everything above works the same way for a group, with one addition: the sources live in a shared library so nobody re-uploads the handbook, and a project can be owned by the team so the work survives the person who set it up. See Your Team Library and Team Projects and Scholarly Teams.
Related
- AI SOPs — the procedure artifact at the centre of most onboarding chains.
- AI Video Lectures — narrated explainers from your own material.
- Customization Profiles — instructions, model, and visual identity saved once and reused everywhere.
- Exporting Your Work — which types export to Word, PowerPoint, and Google.
- Your Team Library and Team Projects — running this workflow with other people.