Hi Bill, I should have shown an example of what you're asking. Anytime you designate a node as a summary node, it will automatically select all the nodes above it. So in the case of the first summary, all the nodes to the top of list (all cats) were included in the curly bracket. When I established the dog summary, same thing happened--it selected the first unsummarized node and included all the others in between. What I didn't show is a second approach. You can also select a number of contiguous nodes out of the middle of a list of siblings (example: nodes 3, 4 and 5 in a list of 10 children) and then use the "New Summary Node (selected nodes)" option. This will cause a new summary node to be created for the list you've highlighted. Hope this helps....

Pulse summary nodes allow you to bracket a group of nodes within a parent and give them a label. Using subnodes to do that would require a lot of duplication to append them to each child node that you want to "summarize." And when you want to change the labels you have to change each of the appended subnodes. Certainly you could do it with sub nodes, but the use of summary nodes is faster and a bit more elegant...

Thinking more about my answer. You could do it another way using subnodes. In the list of animalsin my example above, you could insert two new subnodes between the parent and the existing siblings (e.g. one subnode for cats and another labeled dogs, and move all the existing siblings into one or another.) This works, but you've thus separated the one list of "animals" into two separate lists. It works, but summary nodes allows all the "animals" to be visually kept together...

Hmmm. All I do is simply highlight the summary node a hit delete. Is that not working?

Interesting! It does now. However, in the map I was using when I asked the question, deleting the summary node also deletes some of the nodes being summarised. Maybe I created the summary in some strange way that has confused it. In general though, it does seem to work. Thanks for your help.