...While waxing poetic may work well on the radio, electronic transmissions should be kept short and sweet whenever possible. This goes for e-mail messages, word processing documents, and everything in between. Too much text overwhelms the eyeballs. In grade school, we were taught to skim for important ideas.

Microsoft Word may be able to help! In the Tools menu, select AutoSummarize. Guess what that does? Uh huh. Go ahead and click OK when you're ready to rock and a new daughter window will appear over your document. It's like someone took a highlighter to your screen! You can change the summary percentage on-the-fly; switch to a more simplified view by pressing the left-most button. Of course, this is no substitute for any comprehensive review. But when you need to pick out parts of a paper, I can't think of an easier (or quicker) way. Where was this thing when I was in British literature class?

2003-Dec-18 10:27am lamb@nmmi.edu