Summarize is grayed out for all of my documents. Is there some specific set of actions necessary to use this function? I have tried with PDFs, Word, and text docs.
Edit > Summarize works only in text documents, and only when text has been selected.
If you want to summarize the text of a PDF document it must first be converted to text.
While viewing the PDF select Data > Convert > plain text. This will create another version of your document that’s text only.
Now click in the text panel and press Command-A to Select All. Next, select Edit > Summarize. The result will be a condensed version of the text content.
This is probably most useful when one has a very large PDF (say 500 pages of text) and wishes to reduce the database content to a shortened version of text that probably still contains most of the “keywords” of the original document for searching purposes.
Note that this text document does not link to the PDF file (Info panel, Path field). So before deleting the PDF+Text version you should copy the Path from it and paste it into the shortened content document. That will allow you to still have access to the original document from within your database.