How to Use Summarization Tool on Mac

Have you ever found yourself reading a large chunk of text, wishing you had the “I didn’t read it for too long” feature? Something to shorten text in files on Mac so you understand the general message without any extra information? Fortunately, you can use Mac’s built-in Summarize tool to quickly compress the text you intend to read.

With this tool, you can shorten text to sentence or paragraph. This program condenses your text by removing sentences or paragraphs while trying to preserve the overall message. This will be further explained by the following examples.

Note: The Summarization Tool is to help you read the text, not completely replace it. It is not a substitute for homework or professional work.

How to Use the Summarization Tool

Since this tool comes built-in, we will need to enable the feature and create a keyboard shortcut for quick access.

Step 1: Open System Preferences by clicking the Apple Icon in the upper left corner of your screen.

Step 2: Click Keyboard button.

Stage 3: Click Shortcuts select the tab and Services menu on the left.

Step 4: Scroll through the menu until you see it. to summarize choice. Click the box next to it so that there is a checkmark to enable this function.

Step 5: Click Add shortcut button on the right. We will assign a keyboard shortcut to use this function. The shortcut assigned for this guide will be ⌥+⌘+A (Option+Command+A). Here’s how to add special characters.

Each time you press your shortcut’s keys, you will turn on Summarize. Make sure you choose a shortcut that you can remember, that is easy to use, and that no other shortcuts already exist. Learn how to create more keyboard shortcuts with this guide.

Without Keyboard Shortcuts

If you prefer to use a mouse, you can skip creating shortcuts and follow these steps to open the Summarize tool.

Stage 1: Highlight the text you want to summarize.

Step 2: Choose which alternative method works best for you:

• Right click your mouse
• Hold control and click (control+click with cursor)
• Press the trackpad with two fingers

You will get a drop down menu and click on it. Services.

Stage 3: click to summarize from the second window.

Summarizing Your Text

Well, now that we have the Summarization tool enabled on our macOS, we can now try and get to know the program.

Stage 1: Find an article, magazine, PDF – anything with text that you can highlight that you want to condense. We will be using this review of the Honor 9i for this guide. Feel free to follow this article so you can see how each setting adjusts and summarizes the content.

The entire article is highlighted.

Step 2: Use the keyboard shortcut or one of the alternatives to open the Summary window. A window will open with your text pre-summarized.

There are many settings we need to work with, and each has functional uses. For example, in the lower left corner of the window, you can select one of the following: Sentences and paragraphs. In the lower right corner you have a long bar to change the size of the summary.

Sentences or Paragraphs

You may be wondering what setting you should use for this reading. It really depends on the content and context of your literature. This tool is meant to compliment and lighten your reading load.

If you have very detailed text, you may prefer to use it. Sentences adjustment. This setting removes sentences that the program deems unnecessary while still preserving the meaning and relationship between each sentence.

If your text has major components scattered all over, then Paragraph setting may be more appropriate. This will remove all paragraphs while keeping the flow between each paragraph. It can be a hard cut, but it can be helpful when working with literature with a lot of important content.

Using the summary as well, we can shorten the Honor 9i review article to around 25%.

If you read the text on each box, you’ll see similarities between the general articles, focusing on the phone’s size and aesthetics. However Sentences setting provides additional information. Paragraph not. For example, there are more details about screen resolution and refresh rates, and depending on your needs these can be very important pieces of information.

Overall, both versions provide a good summary of this article. To get the most out of this tool, play around with the settings and adjust them for each reading.

Smaller Not Certain

The Summary tool is very useful when dealing with long, text-heavy documents. However, it does not replace abbreviating any text and is indicative at best. Instead, it aims to give a quicker summary of a long document or article. It’s mostly for personal use, whether you use it to understand your assignments or to quickly prepare text-heavy documents.