After an earlier post today related to Microsoft Copilot, here’s one for users of Microsoft Word: Copilot automatically summarizes Word documents.

The feature began to be rolled out back in August (Microsoft said they were “slowly” rolling it out). As a Copilot Pro user, I noticed it when it began to appear at the top of my Word documents last week.

Per their post announcing the new feature back in August, here are some tips and tricks for using it:

Tips and tricks

• If you authored the document, or if your document is stored locally, the automatic summary opens fully collapsed. Feel free to expand it and review the text to see how the document will come across to your audience.
• If the automatic summary was collapsed when you last closed the document, it will still be collapsed the next time you open it. Similarly, if the automatic summary was expanded when you last closed the document, it will be in a semi-expanded state when you reopen it.
• After you make a change to the document, the Check for new summary button will appear. Select this button to have Copilot check whether the changes warrant generating a new summary.

You can fully read about how it works in the Microsoft post. How well does it work? Here are a couple of examples of the summary it generated for documents I tested, using the case from this morning’s blog post and another case I previously covered.

Today’s Blog Post Case

I loaded the case ruling from this morning’s post into a Word document and let Copilot auto-generate its summary. Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, it provides a high-level of several aspects of the case ruling, which spanned 12 total pages. And it provides links to various references that provide a pop-up note when you hover over them and take you directly to that section when you click on them.

Dale v. Deutsche Telekom AG

This is a case I covered last week, again copying the case (from eDiscovery Assistant here) into a Word document (7 pages) to see what type of summary it would generate. Here’s what it looks like:

Again, it provided a fairly high-level summary of the case ruling. But it left some things out, like the beginning of the negotiations, when the defendant proposed a list of 29 custodians and the plaintiffs countered with a request for 60 custodians.

The other thing Copilot doesn’t do (of course) is provide quotes from the judge involved in the case. What you can do if you want to get those is to click the “Open in chat” button and start asking it questions. Here’s an example of that:

When it comes to case law rulings, quotes from the Court are paramount – especially if it’s a case involving Illinois Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Cole, whose rulings are always entertaining! 🙂 So, you still have to do some work to dive into the document and get that stuff out.

One last test I did was for the famous/infamous DR Distributors v. 21 Century Smoking case from 2021 (covered by me here and here, text of the case here). A whopping 127 pages when copied and pasted into Word. When I asked Copilot to auto-generate a summary, guess what happened? It only read the first 40 pages of the document and then generated its summary. So, the last 80+ pages are not included in the summary that Copilot generated. Copilot still can’t handle very large documents.

Bottom line, the Copilot summary feature in Word provides at least a starting point for understanding a document and giving you some ideas where to drill in for more info – assuming the document isn’t too long, that is.

So, what do you think? Did you know that Copilot automatically summarizes Word documents? If so, have you used the feature? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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