Word now supports summarizing super long documents

Reading and processing huge documents that are hundreds or even thousands of pages long is always an extremely tiring task for anyone, especially when you are racing against a “deadline”. Fortunately, Microsoft has a solution to this problem. The company has just announced an upgrade to the summarization ability in Word, allowing users to create summaries for document files that are 10 times larger than before.

Previously, Copilot in Microsoft Word could only summarize documents up to 300 pages. Now, this feature has been expanded to up to 3,000 pages for a single file.

This improved document summarization feature is rolling out to Microsoft 365 subscribers on both the desktop and web versions. You can use it by opening a document, clicking the Copilot button on the Home tab, and then asking Copilot to generate a summary. You’ll now have the option to choose how long the summary should be: brief, balanced, or detailed. This is a new feature added in this update because Microsoft acknowledges that the previous summarization capabilities weren’t good enough for some types of documents:

We've heard from many users that while the standard summary at the top of a document works well for most cases, it doesn't work for all. Some documents need a more detailed summary to help them understand context, capture important information, or communicate effectively with their team. Additionally, some people work with very long documents—thousands of pages—and want to make sure the main points are covered in the summary.

A brief summary is simply a short paragraph that summarizes the content of a document. A balanced summary will provide a few key points, while a detailed summary will be longer and more specific - ideal when working with large documents.

If you have a Microsoft 365 subscriber subscription, you can try out this upgraded document summary feature on Word for Windows version 2503 (build 18623.20042), Word for Mac version 16.96 (build 25031738), and Word for the web.