How to summarize a 200-page report in plain English
Eleven different summary formats, each calibrated for a different audience.
Summarizing a PDF sounds simple but breaks immediately under different needs. A board director wants a 5-bullet executive summary. A student wants study notes. A new joiner wants a TL;DR. Different jobs, different summaries — and the wrong shape of summary is worse than no summary at all.
Match the format to the job
Executive summary for decision-makers. TL;DR for Slack. Key Points for briefing notes. Study Notes for learning. Action Items for contracts. FAQ for product docs. Section-by-section for keeping document structure visible.
Sectional summaries on long documents
1,000-page documents get one summary per chapter, then a meta-summary across them. The map-reduce structure handles long documents without missing the back half.
Combine with chat
Summarize first to understand the shape; then chat to drill into specifics. The two tools work better together than either alone.
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