Carla,
If you look in File, Properties for an open document, on the Statistics tab,
it gives counts for the following properties: Pages, Paragraphs, Lines,
Word, Characters, Characters with spaces. These statistics are as follows
for a document with no tables:
Pages is obvious, it is the number of page in a doc.
Paragraphs are counted by a paragraph mark (when the user presses enter).
Lines are counted as each line in the document, where a manual paragraph
break, a manual line break or a soft line break (created by Word Wrap), no
matter what the line spacing is set to. For example, in a double-spaced
paragraph with five lines of text, there are five lines.
Words: Each word is counted, however, things like a date in the format of
June 30, 2003 is counted as three words, a date in the format of 06/30/2003
is counted as one word and a phrase like vis-a-vis is counted as one word.
You can create a document and type in some various words and phrases using
punctuation marks like above and then check file properties to see how it
counts the words.
Characters is all characters in the document except for spaces, tabs, para
marks, line breaks, section breaks, page breaks, etc.
Characters with spaces is all characters from above paragraph and also
including spaces (from spacebar) and manual line breaks.
Hope this helps.
Anne