Computers are supposed to make our lives easier and in many ways they do. Yet there are studies suggesting that's really not the case. For the most part I tend to disagree with most of those studies except when it comes to one thing and that's reading. Have you ever thought about how much more reading you do now that you have a computer sitting on your desk? I'd be willing to bet there's a good chance that much of your profession requires you to do a lot of reading. Take email for example. Even with all the junk email filters running at full tilt, most of us acknowledge that reading just the valid emails can really eat into your day. And that's just email. What with all kinds of documents, news items, reports, contracts, brochures and sundry other items your job says you have to read, it's amazing that we get anything done. And if you're a student, you know all about the pain and suffering when it comes to those numerous books you have to get through in a limited amount of time. But there is a way to cut through all the textual clutter and strangely enough, it's your computer that may be able to help you after all.

"Summarize!" is an application from Corpora Software that helps you do what its name says. Using some very sophisticated techniques, Corpora says that its Summarize uses linguistic and statistical analysis algorithms that extract and determine how relevant each sentence in a document is to the key themes running throughout its content. The program then creates a readable summary to reflect the dominant themes. That summary is a lot shorter than the document itself which translates into a lot less reading which means you are going to save a lot of time.

Right out of the box, Summarize does a pretty good job of highlighting what is important. But as with anything that's making a kind of judgment for you, it requires some fine-tuning. Fortunately, Summarize allows you to tweak and adjust how it does its work. You can, for example, tailor what you believe to be the more important themes for which you are looking and Summarize will endeavor to highlight anything that corresponds. The way this works is that you tell it what key words fall within your area of interest. Obviously the more you use it, the more tailored your summaries will become. You can also determine the lengths of the summaries. This can be particularly effective because too much trimming may hinder your efforts in gleaning out the most significant information.

Summarize works with most of the more popular word-intensive applications such as Microsoft's Outlook, Word and PowerPoint. Summarize also works with PDF files and HTML so that it's great for scanning websites and the text within them. You can even scan an email and all of its attached documents with just one click of the mouse.

Corpora has a special server edition which you can incorporate directly into your company's website and into document management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint. With this configuration, it will automatically extract summaries and key words from your documents so as to improve document searches and categorization. Check with Corpora for more details on their Enterprise versions of their Summary products.

Being able to significantly reduce what you have to read while maintaining a statistically same level of understanding will more than likely make Summarize pay for itself in just the time you save from having to read every single word. You just may find yourself becoming more productive at work or accelerating your studies at school. Obviously the product's effectiveness and value to you can really only be determined if you give it a try yourself. You can do so by visiting the Corpora website and buying a copy of Summarize! 2.0 for $49.

www.corporasoftware.com