Counting Words the Old Fashioned Way

Summary: One way to specify word count is to count characters and divide by five. If you still need this old-fashioned way of counting, here's how you can let Word do the heavy calculating for you. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

You probably already knew that Word provides a way to determine the number of words in a selection or in your entire document. Word has its own internal algorithms to figure out the proper count. This is great, if you need to know actual word counts.

Before the days of actual word counts, however, typists figured out the number of average words in a document. This was done by figuring out the number of characters typed, and then dividing that figure by five. For some purposes you may still need to figure word counts using this old-fashioned approach. This can be done with a simple macro, as follows:

Sub WordCount()
    Dim Title As String
    Dim WordCount As Integer
    Dim Message As String

    Title = "WordCount"
    WordCount = Int((Len(Selection) / 5) + 0.5)
    Message = LTrim(Str(WordCount)) + " word"
    If WordCount <> 1 Then Message = Message + "s"
    MsgBox Message, vbOKOnly, Title
End Sub

Tip #757 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Counting Words the Old Fashioned Way