Word Count

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Word Count' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

A Quick-and-Dirty Word Count
Got an editor or teacher who wants you to calculate the number of words in a document the "old fashioned way?" You can do it by using a compound field, discussed in this tip.

Counting Document Lines
Need to know how many lines are in your document? Word provides a quick and easy way you can determine the information.

Counting Words the Old Fashioned Way
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.

Counting Words the Old Fashioned Way with WordBasic
Using the old editorial method of figuring out the number of words in a document.

Displaying a Live Word Count
You can use Tools | Word Count to figure out how many words are in your document. If you want a real-time, constantly updated word count, then you will need to develop your own tools, as described in this tip.

Generating a Count of Word Occurrences
Do you need to know the frequency with which certain words occur in your documents? There is no built-in way to derive this information in Word, but you can use the techniques in this tip to get just what you need.

Ignoring Hyphens in Word Counts
When you do a word count, Word treats hyphenated phrases as a single word. If you prefer a word count that treats hyphenated phrases as multiple words, then you need to perform a few steps to get the desired result. This tip explains why it makes sense to treat hyphenated phrases as single words, and then shows how you can bypass this common-sense approach.

Including Footnotes and Endnotes in Word Counts
When you have Word calculate how many words there are in a document, it normally doesn't pay attention to text in footnotes and endnotes. If you want these words counted in the total, here's how to get the proper count.

Including Text Box Text In Word Counts
If you use text boxes in the layout of your documents, you should know that any word counts you perform do not include any words in those text boxes. If you want to include those words in your counts, you need the information in this tip.

Running Word Counts
Do you need to keep track of how many words are in your document? Word provides a tool to display a word count on demand, but you may want something more automatic, like a running word count. The macro in this tip can be used to display a handy word count that refreshes on a regular interval.

Word and Character Count Information
Using fields you can easily insert both the word and character counts for a document into the document itself. As those counts change (during editing), Word automatically updates what is displayed by the fields. Here's how to put them to work.

Word Count for a Section
Dynamic word counts for your entire document are easy to get when you use using fields. There is no built-in method to get a dynamic word count of just a section of your document. This tip discusses the lacking feature and provides ways you can get the desired information.

Word Count in Multiple Selections
Getting a word count for an entire document is easy. What you may not know is that modern versions of Word can also provide word counts for different selections of text, as well.

Word Count is Zero
If you use the Word Count tool and are surprised that it returns a count of 0, it could be because of what you selected prior to using the tool. Here's the low-down on why you might get this erroneous result.

Word Counts for a Group of Documents
Getting a word count for a single document is easy. Getting an aggregate word count for a large number of documents can be a challenge, as discussed in this tip.