Ever find yourself reading through a large piece of text, wishing there was a “long time no read” feature? Something to shorten the text in files on Mac, so that you understand the general message without additional information? Luckily, you can use your Mac’s built-in Summary tool to quickly compress text you intend to read.
With this tool, you can shorten text by sentence or paragraph. This program will condense your text by removing sentences or paragraphs while trying to retain the overall message. This will be further described with the examples below.
Note: The Summary Tool is intended to aid your reading, not to replace text entirely. It is not a substitute for homework or professional work.
How to use the Summary Tool
Since the tool is 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 on the . icon keyboard button.
Step 3: Click on the . icon keyboard shortcuts tab and select Service menu on the left hand side.
Step 4: Scroll through the menu until you see summary select. Click on the box next to the checkmark to activate this function.
Step 5: Click on the . icon More shortcuts right button. We will assign a keyboard shortcut to use this function. For this tutorial, the assigned keyboard shortcut will be ⌥+⌘+A (Option+Command+A). You can learn how to add special characters here.
Whenever you press the keys on your shortcut, you open the Summary feature. Make sure you choose a shortcut that you can remember as easy to use and not yet a shortcut for something else. Learn how to create more keyboard shortcuts with this tutorial.
No keyboard shortcuts
If you prefer to use the mouse, you can skip creating the shortcut and follow these steps to open the Summary tool.
Step 1: Highlight the text you want to summarize.
Step 2: Choose the alternative method that works best for you:
- Right click on your mouse
- Hold control and click (control + click with pointer)
- Tap on the trackpad with two fingers
You will get a drop down menu and click Service.
Step 3: Click summary from the second window.
Summarize your text
Okay, now that we have the Summary tool enabled on our MacOS, we can now test and learn the program.
Step 1: Find an article, magazine, PDF – anything with text that you can highlight that you want to condense. For this guide, we will be using this review of the Honor 9i. Please follow along with this article so you can see how each setting adjusts and summarizes the content.
All posts are bookmarked.
Step 2: Use the keyboard shortcut or one of the alternatives to open the Summary window. A window will open with your text summarized.
We have many settings to work with and each has its own function to use. For example, in the bottom left corner of the window, you can choose between Sentence And paragraph. In the bottom right corner, you have a long bar to change the size of the summary.
Sentence or Paragraph
So you may be wondering, what settings should you use for this reading? It really depends on your content and literary context. This tool is intended to compliment and offload your reading.
If you have very detailed text, you can prioritize using Sentence setting. This setting removes sentences that the program considers unnecessary while maintaining the meaning and relationship between each sentence.
If your text has key elements scattered all over the place, then Paragraph settings can be more applied. That will delete the entire paragraph while maintaining flow between each paragraph. It can be a drastic cut, but can be useful when working with documents that have a lot of important content spread out.
Using Summarice too, we were able to shorten our Honor 9i review to about 25%.
If you read the text in each box, you’ll see similarities between the articles overall, focusing on the phone’s size and aesthetics. However, the Sentence settings provide additional information that Paragraph do not do. For example, there are more details about screen resolution and refresh rate – and depending on your needs, these can be very important pieces of information.
Overall, both versions provide a reasonable summary of this article. Play with the settings and adjust them for each reading to get the most out of this tool.
Less than Inaccurate
The Summary tool is quite handy when dealing with long documents and lots of text. However, it is not a substitute for shortening any text and is preferably indicative only. Instead, it aims to provide the main idea faster for a long document or article. Whether you use it to understand your assignments or prepare text-heavy documents quickly, it is intended primarily for personal use.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
