Bizarre word count behavior

C

Chris Watson

Does MS Word count words differently from the rest of us? I¹m seeing an
unusual behavior when trying to get an accurate word count. If I have a
sentence that include the phrase ³...for the night² and replace ³for the²
with ³at², the total word count drops by TWO words, not one, even though the
net difference is only one word.

Does anyone know why Word¹s word count does this? I know it might seem silly
but when submitting content for catalogs and online applications, often
every word counts.
 
D

Daiya Mitchell

I can't replicate this, in a quick test. What version of Word and OS are
you using?

Most people complain that Word's word count is too literal, as it usually
looks at every group of characters separated by spaces and calls that a
word. Hyphens and dashes get tricky, and I think MacWord and WinWord are
actually different in how they treat those. MacWord seems to undercount
words separated by em dashes.
 
P

PhilD

Chris said:
Does MS Word count words differently from the rest of us? I¹m seeing an
unusual behavior when trying to get an accurate word count. If I have a
sentence that include the phrase ³...for the night² and replace ³for the²
with ³at², the total word count drops by TWO words, not one, even though the
net difference is only one word.

Did you do the change by find/"replace all"? If so, there may have
been another instance of "for the", which was also changed to "at".

PhilD
 
C

Chris Watson

Thanks to all for the feedback. Sorry, I neglected to include my info - OS
10.4.7 with MS Word 2004 v11.2.

I didn't make the change with "find/replace all" but with a manual change.
Like you, I tried a 3 word doc containing only "for the night" and changed
it to "at night" and the count worked fine. However, the original document
still exhibits this usually behavior. I guess there is just some parameter
that my original document tripped that caused this.
 
J

John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]

Hi Chris:

I expect it's unresolved tracked changes. You have some deletions in there
that haven't taken effect yet...

Cheers


Thanks to all for the feedback. Sorry, I neglected to include my info - OS
10.4.7 with MS Word 2004 v11.2.

I didn't make the change with "find/replace all" but with a manual change.
Like you, I tried a 3 word doc containing only "for the night" and changed
it to "at night" and the count worked fine. However, the original document
still exhibits this usually behavior. I guess there is just some parameter
that my original document tripped that caused this.




Did you do the change by find/"replace all"? If so, there may have
been another instance of "for the", which was also changed to "at".

PhilD

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
 

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