word count in mac word vs pc word

[u0404023]

Hi

I was writing a paper for my university project when I came across this
problem. Apparently, the same document, when opened between mac and pc
platforms, when produce a different word count.

Has anyone got any solution to this?

 

[Fredrik Wahlgren]

Hi

I was writing a paper for my university project when I came across this
problem. Apparently, the same document, when opened between mac and pc
platforms, when produce a different word count.

Has anyone got any solution to this?

Word count? When I open a Word document it only shows a character count. I
think this value is an approximation. The value may vary, I think, depending
on whether you use diacritical marks or special characters.

/Fredrik

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Indeed, after going through the pain of booting up WinWord 2003 in Virtual
PC, I discover this is true.

In 3 tests (though all derived from the same doc)--

"words" was lower on the Mac by 1, 4, and 22
"characters without spaces" was consistently lower on the Mac, by 2, 2, and
12
"characters with spaces" was consistently identical
"paragraphs" was consistently identical
(the significant differences of 12 and 22 were on a 6000-word doc)

How very confusing. It sounds as though there are certain characters that
MacWord considers to be spaces but not to separate words? I don't know.
Perhaps someone with two computers at their convenience could check if there
is a difference in the way they treat hyphens, e.g. 392-0498 as one word or
two? Also en dashes and em dashes might be likely suspects.

 

[Jeffrey Weston [MSFT]]

Hey Daiya,

Is there any chance you could send me that document? Or at least the
sections from which you found these anomonilies? I'd love to take a look at
it. ([email protected])

Thanks