Use Microsoft Word To Summarise Large Texted Articles For You

There was a question that was posted over at MakeUseOf.com which asks “Is there a website that will summarize an online article?”

The Answer:

Well it’s not really a website, but it’s Microsoft Word. You can in fact get Microsoft Word to summaries thousand of words for you. This is a very handy tool especially if you are doing research assignments.

The feature is called AutoSummary Tool.

In the above image, I have added it to my shortcuts so it’s easy to access. To do this, click on the Office Button and select Word Options. Click on the Customize tab, select All Commands from the Drop Down Box of Choose commands from and find AutoSummary Tools in the list and then click on Add.

Once your buttons are setup, you can than begin to summarise your text. Simply copy and paste your text from your source such as a webpage into Microsoft Word and then click on the AutoSummary button you just created.

In this example, I just copied the page of text from the History of Medicine from Wikipedia. It’s just short of 5000 words. Once you click on the button, the following screen will appear.

From here, you have a few summary options to choose from such as the type of summary you want:

• Highlight Key Points
• Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document
• Create a new document and put the summary there
• Hide everything but the summary without leaving the original document

You can then select the percentage of the originally text that you want to summarise. Click on Ok and then review your results.

In the above screenshot, I selected 25% of original text and selected Highlight Key Points.

And that is essentially how you summaries text in Microsoft Word. If you have any problems, let me know in the comments.