Getting a Word Count

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated October 17, 2013)

Need to know how many words you have in your opus? One of the tools that Docs makes available is a word counter that can show you just the information you need.

Using the word counter tool is easy. If you want to only get a word count for a portion of your document, select that portion. (If you only want the count for the entire document, it doesn't matter if you make a selection first or not.) Then choose Tools | Word Count. Docs displays the Word Count dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Word Count dialog box.

Note that the Word Count dialog box shows its counts in two columns. The left column contains the counts for the selected text and the right column shows counts for the entire document. If you didn't make a selection before invoking the word counter tool, then the left column is still visible—it just contains zeroes.

When you are done perusing the statistics in the dialog box, click the Close button to dismiss it.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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