Counting Words and Characters in Word

Amazing Tips - Counting words and characters in Microsoft Word

Need to know how many words/characters you have written in Word, here's how!

So many of my tips come about as a result of a conversation with a client and this is no exception. The client was putting together a set of keywords for his website. There was a limit of 256 characters for this and he didn't know when he had reached that magic number saying his program didn't keep track of that information. Because he was using Microsoft Word I knew it had that capability.

Not only does Word keep track of the number of words you have written as you type but you can also ask it to tell you how many characters are in the document, with or without spaces being calculated. 

As you create a Word document you will notice, in the lower left corner of your screen, there is a continuous word count and even page count. When you click on the word count area a window appears with further statistics as seen in the image below. Now at a glance you can see this information about your document.

Now suppose you only need to know the statistics for a section of your document. To find out that information you would start by selecting an area of your document and then clicking on the word count area of the screen. The statistics for the picture above and below are for the same document but the one below has a paragraph selected so the results are different.

Knowing the statistics can be very important. I have been in many situations where the word or character count is limited and I need to fit my thoughts into a concise number. Hope you find this helpful. As always, if you like this tip please consider sharing it with your associates. 

Happy Computing!

Diane McKeever

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