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!

You can have fields on several places: header, footer, body, text boxes etc. If you use CTRL + A and F9 to update all your fields, you will only update the fields in the body, not in header/footer and text boxes.

At the moment there is one work around: select 'file -> options -> display -> update fields before printing'. Next, whenever you do 'file -> export -> create PDF/XPS' and save it somewhere in a temporary directory, all fields (including header/footer and text boxes) are updated.

I was told this last step was not necessary and clicking 'print preview' would also do the job. I tested this in Word 2013 and Word 2016, but there seems to be a bug: fields in the header/footer are updates, but fields in the body and in text boxes are NOT updates.

Here is my 'idea': fix this bug or even better, create a separate button that updates all fields in the entire document.

I think Microsoft Word, and other Microsoft Office products (Excel, Power Point, Sway, Access, etc) should have a way to easily manage multiple languages!

For instance, it should be easier than saving as and creating a new document! It could have a language switcher in which I choose in what language I'm seeing the document at the moment, and create a new language version.

Another useful tool would be a way to manage the translation process, marking parts in not-translated, automatically translated (needing review), and fully translated. And it'd be very cool to easily view the original text so I can remember what was meant in the original language.

I think it's a necessary and a very cool new feature for Microsoft Office!!

In german speaking countries different quotation marks are usual. The preferences in "Autoformat" only allow one preinstalled intelligent changing from " to opening or closing quotation mark in typographical style. In Germany and Austria these are primary 99 lower opening style and 66 upper closing style; but authoring books the >>chevron style<< is needed. In Switzerland typical << french guillemets >> are in use, but in education ist's the german standard 99/66.
For changing the quotation marks to the preferred style, it is neccessary to use individual Autocorrections or change all standard quotation afterwards by Find & Replace or Makro. It would be more comfortable having a choice to select the standard versions of opening and closing quotation marks free in the Auoformat dialogue.

Make an option to default to always assuming the inking should be retained rather than the edit actually applied. This is how educators would want to use it in order to markup papers.

Also when educators are marking up a paper, they are never changing anything. So circling should default to adding an educator's comment to the paper rather than selecting -- or at least the goal of selecting is only to mark which block of text the comment applies to.

"Cleaning up" editing marks when in educator mode would also be useful. So a sloppy human circle around text should be (optionally?) automatically "cleaned up" into a nice neat tight circle around the text. A line through the text should be "cleaned up" to a nice straight line through the text, and for an added professional touch automatically add the loop at the end of the strike through which makes a "proper copy editor's deletion mark.

Finally when the paper is delivered back to the student with the editing marks and comments in place, the student should be able to start editing their paper with the ability to turn off and on the educator's marks. This is, of course, what "track changes" has supported all along. It's just a matter of making sure educator marks fall under the show/don't show logic of "track changes".

If you (MS) were going to "improve" the tool this way you really should have adhered to "traditional" standards and when changing something this fundamental also made a user controllable option to allow people who need alpha sort to be able to turn back it on.

This is actually the first mention I've seen of this "improvement". It alone is enough to make me serious reject switching to this version.

I haven't bothered trying 2016, simply because I didn't have enough empty space on my HD for it.

Yes, I can see where for some people "last used" is useful. But in my case, in Word I currently have 40 documents pinned (I counted). They sort into my required order because I have added prefixes to force the alphabetical sort to work for me. Switching to last used order will totally disorder my orderly process making my work harder.

I am very disappointed.

I hope you will do the "right thing" and quickly (in a year or two, I am not a totally unrealisitic idealist <sigh> ) add a user controlled "option" to select alpha sort.

It is a Word 2013 bug to not highlight the first Find/Replace hit occurrence per page while in Print Layout view (i.e., the Ctrl+H Find/Replace). This annoying behavior has been hindering productivity for going on 3 years now.
This bug can be reproduced on Office 2013 / Word 2013 by performing the following steps:

(1) Open a multi-page Word document with ample common words like "the" or "and" in Word 2013.

(2) Ensure you are at the top of the document (i.e. press Ctrl+Home keys).

(3) On Ribbon: VIEW tab - Click "Print Layout".

(4) On Ribbon: HOME tab - Click "Find" pull-down arrow-menu in Editing section at far right - Click Advanced Find... (or press Ctrl+H keys - Click Find tab).

(5) Enter "the" or "and" (or a less common word) in "Find what:" field - Press Enter key (or click Find Next button) repeatedly over and over for a few pages.

(6) Notice how the first occurrence of "the" or "and" on each subsequent new page doesn't get highlighted. Then, if you press the Enter key (or click Find Next button) again the second and all subsequent occurrences of "the" or "and" (or other word) on that page do get highlighted.

(7) Continue to press the Enter key (or click Find Next button) repeatedly over and over for a few pages to see the first occurrence of "the" or "and" (or other word) on each subsequent new page not get highlighted.

Please help us fix this "Find/Replace not highlighting the first hit/occurrence on a page while in Print Layout" view bug in Word 2013 (not just Word 2016).