How to summarise a document with AI
Open the document in Write by Zaweba, connect your own AI account and choose Summarise from the AI menu. The summary can open in a new document or go below.
Summarise, in the AI menu of Write by Zaweba, does the job once you have connected your own AI account. With nothing selected, the whole document's text is summarised. With a passage selected, just that part is. The summary comes back for you to place: in a new document, below the text, at the cursor, or copied to use elsewhere.
Good reasons to summarise
Long documents land in everyone's inbox. A forty page report before a meeting, a set of policy changes from work, a lease, minutes from a committee you missed, a reading list chapter for a course. A summary tells you what matters and where to look more closely. It does not replace reading the parts that affect you, but it helps you find them.
Summaries are also useful in the other direction, when you have written something long and need a short version for a cover email, an abstract or the top of a report.
Setting up the account
Write has no AI of its own. You connect an account you already have: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Azure, Mistral, Grok, DeepSeek and others are supported, as is a local model through Ollama, or a chat website by copy and paste. Until you connect one, the AI menu does nothing and sends nothing.
Summarising step by step
Open the document. It can be a .docx or .odt sent to you, an .rtf, a Markdown file or plain text, since Write opens all of them. Decide whether you want the whole document summarised or only a part. For the whole thing, make sure nothing is selected. For a part, select it.
Open the AI menu and choose Summarise. When the reply arrives, opening it in a new document is usually best for a summary of someone else's document, because it keeps their file untouched. For your own report, insert it at the top as a summary paragraph and edit it into shape.
If the reply uses Markdown, such as headings or lists, Write turns it into real formatting, and the insertion is a single undo step.
Long documents and the size limit
Write sends the selected text, or the document's text if nothing is selected, trimmed to 24,000 characters. A very long document will be cut at that point, so a summary of the whole thing may miss the later sections. For a long report, summarise it a section at a time: select each section, summarise it, and gather the results in a new document. The navigation pane, which lists the headings, makes it quick to find each section.
Other ways to condense text
Make bullet points turns a passage into a list of its main points, which is often easier to scan than a paragraph. Explain helps with a passage full of jargon. Write a title suggests a heading for a section you have summarised.
Trusting the summary
A summary is only as good as the reading behind it. AI can miss a key condition, or state something more strongly than the original. For anything with money, law or health in it, use the summary to find the important parts and then read those parts in full.
The Context sent view shows exactly what Write sent, so you can confirm which part of the document the summary is based on. Write by Zaweba keeps you in control of what goes out and where the answer lands.
