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Using the Writing Tools of Word (7)
Summarizing Documents
If you're preparing a report or a long article, Word can scan your document and help you to create an executive summary at the beginning automatically. In the process, it tries to capture all of the key points and then group them together in a paragraph.
You can adjust the size of the summary paragraph and choose four different options about the summary type. They are:
1. Highlight key points. So you can easily see what Word has or hasn't included in the summary.
2. Create a new document and put the summary there.
3. Insert an executive summary or abstract at the top of the document.
4. Hide everything but the summary without leaving the original document.
To create an automatic summary, follow these steps:
1. In Word, choose "Tools" menu -->
"AutoSummarize". Word then summarizes your document and displays the "AutoSummarize" dialog box.
3. Set how much of your document to be included in the summary statistics under the "Length of summary" section. You can set the limit by choosing an option from the "Percent of original" list, or by selecting the current value and typing a new one.
4. Click "OK" button to display a summary view of the document.
5. Click "Close" button to close the summary view.
In addition, you can click the "Update Document Statistics" check box to have Word update the statistics shown on the "Statistics" tab of the "Properties" dialog box, if summarizing your document changes them. Likewise, the document's word, line, character and paragraph count will correspondingly increase after the summary information has been copied to an executive summary section in your document, for example.
On the left of the toolbar, there is a "Highlight/Show Only Summary" button to let you toggle the view between the view you chose (highlighted or summary-only) and the normal document view. In the middle, you can click the arrows, click in the slider box, or drag the slider bar in the percent slider to control the percentage of document included in the summary, just like what we can do in the "Percent Of Original" list in the "AutoSummarize" dialog box.
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2. Choose one of the four buttons about the "Type of summary".
Besides, Word will display the "AutoSummarize" toolbar if you use the option to highlight the summary information in your document or to display only the summary information. 
This is the end of this series. I will bring you another interesting topic next time.
(Email address: 'Daniel_KC_To@police.gov.hk')