There are now more ways to summarize long Microsoft Word documents

Hello, Microsoft 365 Insiders! We are Tanja Petrovic and Stéphanie Visser, Product Managers on the Word team. We are thrilled to share two exciting updates:

• a significant increase in the size of the documents you can summarize.
• the ability to see different summary lengths at the top of your document.

More ways to summarize long Word documents​

We heard from many of you that the standard key-point summary at the top of the document is great for most documents, but not all. Some documents warrant a more detailed summary to better understand context, gather important information, or communicate effectively with your team. Additionally, some of you work with very long documents – up to thousands of pages – and want to ensure that the main points are represented in the summary. This is why we have introduced the ability to toggle between different summary lengths easily. Our new Detailed summary also supports summarization of up to 3,000 pages in a document, an upgrade from the previous cap of around 300 pages (a 10X increase!).

How it works​

1. Open an existing document in Microsoft Word on your desktop, or navigate to Word for the web.
2. If you already have access to the summary at the top of your document, open it by clicking View more or expanding with the chevron. If you don’t have access to the summary, ask Copilot to create one by selecting Home > Copilot and then entering Summarize this doc in the chat box. Review the summary Copilot generates and use it as is if you’re satisfied with the result, or generate a new one.
3. If you want to toggle between summary lengths, open the dropdown menu underneath the summary and select Brief (a short paragraph), Standard (key points summarized), or Detailed (a long-form summary).

NOTE: To summarize the entirety of documents that are longer than 300 pages, select Detailed.

Availability​

The summary-level dropdown feature, along with long document support in the Detailed option, is currently available in Word for the web and rolling out to Word desktop users running:

• Windows: Version 2503 (Build 18623.20042) or later.
• Mac: Version 16.96 (Build 25031738) or later.

Try them out in Word for the web.

Feedback​

We would love to hear from you! Please submit your comments and feedback by selecting Help > Feedback in Word, or by using the Copilot thumbs up or down buttons.