How to Automatically Summarize an Office 2007 Document
Sometimes when writing reports, you may need to summarize it, especially if it is a long one. But that may be quite difficult to accomplish if there are a lot of different types of information contained within it. If you are using Word 2007, there is a feature to summarize documents, called the Auto Summarize feature. This is a useful feature that gives a score to each sentence in your Word document. You can use the sentences with highest score to write the summary for your document. And, if you don’t want to do even that, you still can use the Auto Summarize function.
Let’s now go through the steps to access and use the AutoSummarize feature.
We start by adding the “AutoSummary” shortcut to the quick access bar in Word 2007. Here are the steps:
- On the Office menu, click the “Word Options” button.
- Now, click “Customize” on the left panel, and then select “All Commands” from the “Choose commands from” list.
- Scroll down the command list, select “AutoSummary Tools” and then click the “Add” button.
The AutoSummarize icon will now be added to the Quick Access bar of your Word 2007. Let’s now use this feature to summarize a document.
NB: The text in the Word document used in the screenshots is created automatically. You can create it too. Just type “=rand()”, without quotes in a blank document, and hit Enter.
Click the “AutoSummary Tools” icon on the Quick Access bar and then select “Auto Summarize”.
The AutoSummarize dialog box will be displayed.
If you select “Highlight key points”, the most commonly used phrases in the document will be highlighted and you may use them to write the summary.
Also, depending on the length of the document, you may set the percent of the original document you want to use for the summary. The default value is 25%.
If you choose to create an executive summary, then the document is automatically summarized for you and the text is placed at the top of the document.
You can also choose to create a new document for summary or display only the summary and hide everything else in the document.
So, next time the boss says to write an executive summary of a long report “ASAP”, you know how easy it is to do it in double quick time!