Variable Word Count

[aitch]

This is a reposting as I earlier put the question into the wrong place.

On my machine there are a number of stories I have written - varying from
over 70000 words down to about 1000. I need the number of words to let
potential editors know when I submit something.

These are stored in a sub-section of Documents. Today I discovered that a
right click offers "more" - giving me extra column categories than I didn't
know about, and they include one specifically titled Word Count. This seemed
like manna from Heaven until I created and used this extra column.

Some of the variations between the original W Count from the document and
the one automatically inserted by Windows in the column are quite striking.

Some examples. The first figure is using Tools / Word count; The second from
the W.C. option in the column in Documents from 'more' .

3959 3062 Diff -927
3786 3161 -625
12279 10321 -1958
5687 4565 -1122.

A couple of counts match exactly at 2668 and 918 while a novel length piece
of 71796 words shows a tiny difference of +3.

The Word version I use is from Office XP Pro and the Documents folder I use
is included in Vista.

Has anyone any advice to give or comments to make? All comments would be
appreciated.

Cheers,

Aitch.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You do know, don't you, that you can insert a NumWords field into the
document itself?

That doesn't answer your question, of course, and perhaps someone else can
do that. Do your documents contain empty paragraph marks? I think Word
counts each of those as a word, along with certain other things such as page
and section breaks. But I'm no expert on this, so I'll wait for one of them
to weigh in.

 

[aitch]

Hello Suzanne,

I've been holding on but it looks as though there's no response to my mail
apart from yours. Thanks for the interest.

I'll simply carry on using the Word Count from Tools - I've never had any
complaints from anyone about the count I've used and I feel happy with it.

Regards,

H

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi H.,

The Windows Explorer preview properties for detail view with that particular c property column (Word count) appears to be a Vista
only feature and is a 'by file type' association property.

Hopefully one of the folks who has Office XP and Vista installed together will be able to test this a bit more.

I don't have any data on the method Windows is using to determine the word count, but I suspect it's probably reading the value you
get from inside Word
Office Button=>Prepare=>Properties=>Document Properties
choose Advanced Properties=>Statistics

Do you get the same 'mismatch' between clicking the 'Words:' (counter) choice on the status bar in Word 2007 and that dialog as you
get when viewing it in Windows Vista Explorer (open file) dialogs?

===========
Hello Suzanne,

I've been holding on but it looks as though there's no response to my mail
apart from yours. Thanks for the interest.

I'll simply carry on using the Word Count from Tools - I've never had any
complaints from anyone about the count I've used and I feel happy with it.

Regards,

H >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[Mick M]

Hello Bob,

Sorry I've been a while replying but things have been a bit hectic.

I had already decided just to ignore the difference in the count and rely on
'old faithful' in Word. It's the version from 2002 so your references to
later editions leave me slightly confused.

As I won't be following this up I just wanted to thank you for your input.

"*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*" (Now where have I
seen that somewhere recently).

Regards.

M.