Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Summarizing a Document Automatically

Word includes a feature called AutoSummarize that can, under just the right circumstances, help you create a summary of a document. Word does that by coming up with a word frequency list, and then rating each sentence in the document according to how many frequently used words appear in the sentence. You then assign a cutoff point, and any sentence that exceeds the cutoff point is included in the summary.

You might want to try AutoSummarize on highly structured, repetitive documents, just to see whether it generates anything other than gibberish. To use it, choose Tools, AutoSummarize. Specify whether you want to highlight the high-scoring sentences or extract those sentences and use them to create a free-standing ...