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Correct Word Count

The word count noted at the bottom of the word online document is incorrect. It counts words with apostrophes (e.g., "can't") as 3 words instead of 1. Please fix the Word Online word count feature. Thank you!

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Skylet Yu shared this idea  ·   ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
completed  ·  AdminSami Rahman [Microsoft] (Program Manager, Office.com) responded  · 

We’ve added paragraph and character count to Word Online and have also fixed many of the accuracy issues with word count. You can see the new Word Count dialog by clicking on the status bar button (next to the page count) or going to the Review ribbon tab and clicking the Word Count button.

Missing the Hide Word Count option? Don’t worry, it’s now an option in the Word Count ribbon button drop down menu.

Enjoy!

24 comments

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  • Sabrina Maddock commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Word count should add an option for a word count without footnotes and also should not be "about" however many words but an exact word count

  • Ji Zhang MS Product Team commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Thanks for your feedback. You can find Word count in the left bottom corner of your document. There is "WORD COUNT: OFF". You will see the word count by clicking it.

  • Ji Zhang MS Product Team commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    Thanks for your feedback. You can find Word count in the left bottom corner of your document. There is "WORD COUNT: OFF". You will see the word count by clicking it.

  • Ji Zhang MS Product Team commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    The word count is displayed in the left bottom corner of your document. There is a string "WORD COUNT: OFF". You could see word count by clicking it.

  • lorae commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    The word count noted at the bottom of the word online document is incorrect. It counts words with apostrophes (e.g., "can't") as 3 words instead of 1. Please fix the Word Online word count feature.

  • Megan commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    The word count in the toolbar needs to be accurate. It currently counts contractions as three words instead of one. I copied my document from Word Online and pasted into Word 2010. The word count dropped from 14,400 o 13,360. I was baffled and started comparing individual sentences.
    Word Online's word count is off and way too high. Please fix this!

  • Craig Bond commented  ·   ·  Flag as inappropriate

    To Microsoft devs - In the age of content creation with Word dominating the market, everyone can agree that character count is often more important than word count. And it's a pain in the neck having to click word count 500 times when you're writing just to keep checking the character count...

    It begs the question - what are bloggers and hired writers using to write short- and medium-form content? Surely there are any number of use cases that require a large percentage of writers to use character count, such as myself and many others who've had this question, including proofreaders, people who create subtitles, etc...

    Here is a counter showing how many blog posts are written worldwide per day based on historical trends: http://www.worldometers.info/blogs/

    We can also look here: https://www.quora.com/How-many-blog-posts-are-written-every-day

    As a very conservative estimate, if even 30% of those blog posts were written using Word and even 15% valued the character count feature, that would mean about 125,000 bloggers per day are missing out on what should be a very basic feature. That doesn't include anybody else, such as proofreaders and subtitlers mentioned above... That's just the blogger count.

    The problem is, Microsoft has no incentive to update "convenient" or "nice-to-have" features because you dominate the market. Hope to see this implemented in the future. Thank you!

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