Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Working with AutoSummarize

Word can summarize your documents for you—or, more precisely, attempt to do so. AutoSummarize reviews the entire document and then scores each sentence based on a variety of factors, such as whether a sentence contains keywords—the words used the most often throughout the document. The sentences that get the highest score are included in your summary.

Because Word can't understand the subtleties of your document, the results of running AutoSummarize are mixed—from good to terrible. In general, the more tightly structured your document is, the better chance you have of getting useful results. You also generally have better luck with documents that cover a few key topics in-depth, as opposed to documents that include ...