Display Character Count in Status Bar (Word 2010)

Anonymous
2010-12-25T18:30:36+00:00

I can right-click on the status bar and display the Word Count, but I need to see the Character Count as I type.

How can I display the Character Count in the status bar?

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Paul Edstein 82,871 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2010-12-28T03:08:51+00:00

Without programming a new class event to intercept your typing, you can't get a dynamic character count to display on the status bar and, if you did, it would probably prevent anything else displaying there.

You could, though, use a macro like the following and assign a keyboard shortcut to it:

Sub CharCount()

Application.StatusBar = "Character Count = " & ActiveDocument.Characters.Count

End Sub

The above macro temporarily takes over the status bar to display the character count. It gets hidden again as soon as you resume whatever you were doing.

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Answer accepted by question author
Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
2012-03-26T23:18:36+00:00

Technically, something is always selected. If the selection is collapsed to just the insertion point, then the selection is the single character to its right (which may be a paragraph mark). Therefore, the modified macro will show 'Character Count = 1' .

If that makes you unhappy, you can change the macro to this:

Sub CharCount()

If Selection.Type = wdSelectionIP Then

   Application.StatusBar = "Character Count = 0"

Else

   Application.StatusBar = "Character Count = " & Selection.Characters.Count

End If

End Sub

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-06-14T19:25:31+00:00

    Hi Jay - thanks for the reply. I certainly can quantify how many blog posts are being written each day, which is in the millions (shown in my second link http://www.worldometers.info/blogs/). We can also look here: https://www.quora.com/How-many-blog-posts-are-written-every-day

    As a very conservative estimate, if even 30% of those blog posts were written using Word and even 15% valued the character count feature, that would mean about 125,000 bloggers per day are missing out on what should be a very basic feature. That doesn't include anybody else, such as proofreaders, subtitlers (as one previous commenter mentioned), etc... That's just the blogger count.

    The problem is, Microsoft has no incentive to update "convenient" or "nice-to-have" features because they dominate the market. Having said that, I understand prioritizing and I'm only arguing it because it's a feature I personally would like to see.

    Upvoting on your previous links now! :)

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  2. Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2016-06-14T18:48:47+00:00

    Can you quantify how many of those blogs are active and currently being written in Word, or would be if character counts were easier to get? That's the kind of information that Microsoft would be interested in.

    Seriously -- get more people to vote up those UserVoice topics. Microsoft has promised that suggestions with "lots" of votes will be investigated for implementation, and we've seen that happen, but only with some hundreds of votes.

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-06-14T17:05:55+00:00

    Jay - you're correct that Word is a heavy-duty tool for writing large amounts of text. But it also begs the question - what are bloggers and hired writers using to write short- and medium-form content? Surely there are any number of use cases that require a large percentage of writers to use character count, such as myself and many others who've had this question -- otherwise it wouldn't be a discussion. 

    As per your suggestion, here is an example from uservoice about suggestions for character count:

    Implement character counting.

    "I am currently answering essays with a required character count, and it would help much to have a character counter. I am using an online character counter."

    Here is an infographic showing that an estimated 152,000,000 blogs existed in 2013: http://www.wpvirtuoso.com/how-many-blogs-are-on-the-internet/

    Here is another counter showing how many blog posts are written worldwide per day based on historical trends: http://www.worldometers.info/blogs/

    So I'm not sure about your meaning that you "don't agree at all" that character count is not important. Tell that to all the people blogging on the 152,000,000+ blogs in the world.

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