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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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
    2015-04-05T16:25:27+00:00

    I do subtitling work where character count is also very important and too time consuming to bring up the dialog box on each line. Thankfully, the company I work for provided these instructions on knowing character count (including spaces) as you type:

    For Word 2007 or 2010:

    1. Right click anywhere in the status bar.
    2. When a list of features to be displayed pops up, select Column.
    3. Go back into your document and click at the end of a given line.
    4. The number that appears beside Column: xx indicates the position of your cursor (i.e. which 'column it's in).  Since there is no Column 0, simply mentally subtract 1 from the number and you'll know how many characters you've typed so far. This includes spaces and can also be seen at a glance as you're typing.

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  2. Jay Freedman 208.3K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2015-04-01T17:41:11+00:00

    I suggest you to use this Word Character Count tool to monitor the number of words and character in a given text in real time.

    That tool may work in real time (I haven't tried using it), but it has no applicability to Microsoft Word -- it's purely a browser-based tool. If you wanted to type all your text into it to get a count, you'd then have to copy/paste the text into a Word document and apply formatting. That's actually more work than using any of the procedures suggested in this thread.

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