June 10, 2004

Counting Words in Word and WordPerfect

Although not as prophetic as counting crows, counting the number of words in your document may be useful. You may need to submit a 500-word essay or type a document where you are paid by the word. Or, perhaps, you must explain why you want to be the “Queen of Interstellar Dust” in twenty-five words or less.

WordPerfect 11 and 12
WordPerfect can automatically calculate the number of words in your document. To provide as accurate a result as possible, WordPerfect includes in its word-count total the contents of any footnotes, endnotes, and comments, but it counts the content of a running header or footer only once. In addition, WordPerfect uses the Writing Tools to ensure that, among other things, each hyphenated word is counted as a single word.

To access the word-count feature in WordPerfect 11 or 12, click File, Properties. When the Properties dialog box displays, click the Information tab. Alternatively, if you've installed WordPerfect Office 11 Service Pack 1 (or if you're using WordPerfect 12), you can access the word-count feature directly by clicking Tools, Word Count/Info.

Earlier Versions of WordPerfect
These statistics and more are available in WordPerfect for both DOS and Windows, 6.0 and later. In DOS, use Tools, Writing Tools (or Alt+F1), then choose 4/Document Information. In WordPerfect for Windows 8.0, choose File, Properties (in version 7.0, it is File, Document, Properties), then click the Information tab; in 6.x versions, it's just File, Document Info

Microsoft Word
In addition to counting words, Microsoft Word can tell you how many pages, paragraphs, and lines are in your document, as well as the number of characters, either including or not including spaces. You can include footnotes and endnotes in the count. If you want to count part of a document rather than the whole, Word can count the footnotes or endnotes that refer to the selected text. You can also select multiple sections of text to count at a time, and the sections do not have to be next to each other.

To access the word-count feature in Microsoft Word 97 and newer, click on Tools, and then Word Count. The results of everything Word counts are displayed in the Word Count dialog box. Click Show Toolbar if you want to recount as you make revisions without reopening the dialog box. The Word Count toolbar will open in your document. If you display the Word Count toolbar, you can click Recount at any time, or press ALT+C. You can also view the number of words and lines in a document by clicking Properties on the File menu, and then clicking the Statistics tab.

If you are using a word processor other than those mentioned, you can search their help file for instructions. Otherwise, you may wish to find a third grader who will count them manually.