“Speed Read” Long Documents at the Click of your Mouse
16 April 2001 By Bill Coan (http://www.wordsite.com)
My brother-in-law says he’s too busy to read the newspaper unless his administrative assistant reads it first and highlights the key sentences for him.
When it comes to personal efficiency, he’ll never catch me. Here’s why:
Word can highlight key sentences for me anytime I want, at the click of my mouse. In fact, my copy of Word does something even more useful.
When I click my custom AutoSummarize button, Word displays just the key sentences from my document. That way I don’t have to scroll through the document looking for highlighted sentences. Instead, I can read an instant summary, almost as though my adminstrative assistant had shredded the document and kept only those sentences worthy of my precious time.
With another click of my custom button, Word hides the summary and again displays the entire document.
If you’re more patient than I am, you can tell Word to display a summary of your document fairly easily as follows:
1. On the Tools menu, choose AutoSummarize.
2. In the AutoSummarize dialog box, click “Hide everything but the summary without leaving the original document.”
3. Click OK.
If you’re already viewing a summary, you can hide it and return to the full document as follows:
1. Locate the AutoSummarize toolbar.
2. On the AutoSummarize toolbar, click Close.
This built-in approach leaves plenty to be desired. For one thing, it takes too many mouse clicks. For another, it requires you to click buttons with sesquipedelian captions like “Hide everything but the summary without leaving the original document.” If you’ve got time to read captions like that, you don’t need a summary; you’ve got time to read an entire document.
To me, summaries are all about SPEED. If they take more than a click to show and hide, then they’re TOO SLOW. My custom AutoSummarize button lets me show and then hide a summary faster than you can read this sentence. And that allows me to get a lot more benefit out of Word’s AutoSummarize function.
Setting up a custom AutoSummarize function is extremely easy. Don’t be put off by the number of steps. You can complete them in less than two minutes and from then on you’ll be showing and hiding document summaries far faster than my brother-in-law can read his yellow-soaked newspaper.
Here’s how to customize Word’s AutoSummarize function for maximum speed:
1. On the Tools menu, choose Macro | Macros…
2. Under Macro Name, enter ToolsAutoSummarize and click Create.
3. Edit Word’s version of the macro text to read exactly as follows:
Sub ToolsAutoSummarize()
On Error Resume Next
With ActiveDocument
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.ShowSummary = False
Else
.SummaryViewMode = wdSummaryModeHideAllButSummary .SummaryLength = 25 .ShowSummary = True End If End With End Sub
4. Press Alt+F11 to return to Word.
5. On the Tools menu, choose Customize and then choose Commands.
6. In the Categories list, choose All Commands.
7. In the Commands list, scroll down to ToolsAutoSummarize.
8. Drag ToolsAutoSummarize out of the list and up to a toolbar.
9. Drop ToolsAutoSummarize on your favorite toolbar.
10. Close the Customize dialog box.
That’s all there is to it. To view a summary of a document, simply open it and click your new toolbar button . To return to the full document, click the same button again. Fast, eh? You bet! Now you’ve got a tool that saves time just when time is most critical to you.
Before stopping to pat yourself on the back, why not explore a couple of modifications? Perhaps you’d like to see key sentences in context, highlighted in yellow. Perhaps you’d like to include fewer sentences. To accomplish these changes, proceed as follows:
1. Press Alt+F11 to return to the macro edtor.
2. Delete the following lines of code from your macro:
.SummaryViewMode = wdSummaryModeHideAllButSummary .SummaryLength = 25
3. Insert the following lines of code in place of the deleted lines:
.SummaryViewMode = wdSummaryModeHighlight
.SummaryLength = 15
4. Press Alt+F11 to return to Word and test the results.
5. Repeat Steps 1 – 4 to restore the original lines of code.
How does Word’s AutoSummarize function work?
First it analyzes your document and determines key points by assigning a score to each sentence. Sentences that contain words used frequently in the document are given a higher score. A percentage of the highest-scoring sentences are displayed in the summary.
According to Microsoft, AutoSummarize works best on well-structured documents, including reports, articles, and scientific papers. Personally, I find that it works well on correspondence and lengthy newsletter articles.
For example, here’s how AutoSummarize summarized the start of this article:
“Speed read” long documents at the click of your mouse
By Bill Coan (http://www.wordsite.com)
When I click my custom AutoSummarize button, Word shows
just the key sentences from my document. With another click
of my custom button, Word hides the summary and again
displays the entire document.