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?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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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. Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2016-06-14T14:42:13+00:00

    "Surely in the age of Twitter and content creation, everyone can agree that character count is often more important than word count."

    No, I don't agree at all. Microsoft Word is a heavy-duty tool for writing large amounts of text, not for writing 140-character tweets. If the people who buy the majority of Office licenses considered character count to be more important than word count, Microsoft would have known that and done something about it long ago.

    Go to https://word.uservoice.com/search?filter=ideas&query=character%20count and total the votes for all the suggestions about character counts under all the different versions of Word.

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-06-14T13:52:06+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

    Hi Jay - thanks for the macro suggestion, but 99% of people using Word are not going to use a macro. The OP is looking for a permanent solution from the devs to implement a simple feature of displaying character count in the status bar. I am using Office 2016 and this feature still is not implemented. Surely in the age of Twitter and content creation, everyone can agree that character count is often more important than word count. And it's a pain in the neck having to click word count 500 times when you're writing just to check the character count...

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  3. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-04-05T18:45:41+00:00

    That's fine as long as you don't need a character count for more than one line. If you're trying to keep the number of characters to a certain number per line, you'd be better off using a monospaced font, setting the margins to accommodate the allowed number of characters, and then pressing Enter at the end of every line.

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