Having Trouble Writing Summaries? Check Out Auto Summary, MS Word 2007

Writing summaries can be a daunting task for just about anyone, especially a college freshman student who has volumes upon volumes of assignments, projects, research and term papers to write. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a word processing feature that would take your full page text and automatically create a summary for you? Well, believe it or not, MS Word 2007 does just that! Now, all you freshman students will not have to spend countless hours lamenting over how you are going to create summaries. Like most software applications, finding such a feature is sometimes like going on a treasure hunt without a map! You find no treasure and waste a whole lot of time, a commodity that college freshman students just do not have. If you are running MS Word 2007, the following simple steps will take you to the treasure of auto summary:

1. Click on the MS Word icon to open MS Word 2007;

2. After the page opens, click on the MS logo in the upper left hand corner of the page;

3. This will open a menu list and at the bottom of the list, to the right find “Word Options” and click on “Word Options”;

4. Next you will find a group of options to select. Select “Customize.”

5. Next you will see a command text box. Select “all commands.” Scroll down the command list and find auto summary tools. Click on “auto summary tools.” Then, click on the “add” button to the right; This places the auto summary icon just below the title on your word document.

Now you are ready to use the auto summary feature of MS Word 2007. Open an existing word file or create a file that you want to summarize. With the page open, click on the auto summary icon. You are presented with a choice of 4 summary option types as well as a choice of how you want the length of the summary to be selected. You can Highlight key points, Create a new document and put the summary there, Insert an executive summary at the top or Hide everything but the summary. Your choices for selecting the length of the summary are as follows: 10 sentences, 20 sentences; 100 words or less; 500 words or less; 10% or 25% of the document length. Just click the type of summary, select the summary length choices and watch your new summary appear. Now the only question we have for college freshman students is, “How are you going to spend all the time you saved by reading this article and learning what MS Word 2007 can Summarize for You!