Viewing word and character counts
Knowing the word and character count of a document can help you better understand things such as the readability of the document and how much space you are using in a document. You can use word length and word count in a sentence to help determine readability. Knowing these things can also be very helpful in publishing and typesetting. Word has an excellent word and character count tool that we will explore in this section.
The Word Count tool is located in the lower left of the Status Bar in Word. The Status Bar is at the bottom of the document and just above the Windows Start button and search box. It is between the page number and the Editor button.
The following screenshot shows the Word Count tool:
Figure 6.35 – The Word Count tool
By default, Word Count is set to display the word count in the document, but it also keeps track of several other statistics. To see those statistics, click on the word count...
