By far, there’s too much information surrounding us all. It’s close to impossible to absorb everything! After all, we live in the “knowledge economy” so reading reports, articles, emails and documents is a part of our every day life.

Here’s a quick tip for you: Condense your readings using an easy-to-use (but often hidden) software feature called “Auto-Summarize.” It’s like having someone highlight the document for you.

“Auto-Summarize” is a simple automated computer task that identifies the key points of an article making skimming the report easier. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a good starting point for reading a document and it works best with clearly structured documents.

Step-by-Step Microsoft Word (PC and Mac versions) Instructions

1. Open your document (or copy and paste information from a website or an email into a new Word document)
2. In the Toolbar, click “Tools” then click “Auto Summarize”
3. Select your options, click “OK.”

Microsoft Word Auto Summarize Options

Highlight the key points. This is useful if you want to keep all of the contents as is but just have the appropriate sections highlighted for you. It serves as a good guide of what content is important.

Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document. This is helpful if you need a little guidance in creating an executive summary or abstract of your report or article. It’ll provide you with what the software thinks is important and then you can freely edit it. Alternatively, if you want to read a little summary before diving into the document, this is a helpful option since the original text remains unchanged below the executive summary.

Create a new document and put the summary there. This is helpful if you want to keep the original document unchanged and have an entirely separate file to hold your summary.

Hide everything but the summary without leaving the original document. This is similar to the option mentioned above, but this option is only temporary. Once you remove the summarize feature (by clicking “close” on the Summarize tool bar), it will revert back to the original document. This is great if you want to quickly read the summary but not lose the original content.

Length of summary. This lets you use different densities for the summary. For example, you can make the synopsis appear as 25% of the original text or in 100 words or less.

Mac OS X Users Extra Trick

For Mac OS X users, the summarize feature is embedded into the operating system. This is great for summarizing articles within the Safari web browser or reading a text document with TextEdit.

To use this feature:

1. Highlight the text you want to summarize (press “Command + A” to highlight all text)
2. Click the Program name in the title bar (ie. “Safari,” “TextEdit,” etc.)
3. Click “Services” > “Summarize”

Of course, in either case, you shouldn’t rely on the automatic summarize feature for reading critical or legal documents. It’s simply a quick tip to help you get the main points of your readings or help you write your executive summaries for any documents you publish.

Besides, it might just save a little time!