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Some questions about counting lines: (sm) - Helena Handbasket

Posted: Jul 22, 2010

I've started monitoring my line counts against what my company comes up with on a few random reports. I have a couple questions:

- I've counted lines vs characters with both my company's line counter, and the Microsoft Word line counter (In the top toolbar: "Tools", "Word Count"). There's a slight discrepancy, and I wondered if any of you notice the same amount of difference:

If counting lines, Microsoft comes up with considerably more than my company's counter does.

If counting characters, Microsoft usually comes out very slightly higher than my company's counter, but not by a lot.

? - Does anyone know how many characters constitutes a line in the Microsoft counter? I know my company's is 65. Just wondered, because when I divide the total characters counted by Microsoft by the number of lines it says I've done, each time the lines have a different number of characters: 23, 42, 58, etc. Something just doesn't seem right, but I can't figure out what it is, or how to determine for sure if I'm being cheated or not.

You have to remember that if you are using - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
the Word line count, it is counting everything in the document, while your company is probably not paying for headers or footers, so your line counts will more than likely be different. I don't know what Word considers a line--it may be a gross line; but to figure your line count just divide the character count by 65 -- using with spaces or without spaces, however your company does it.

Word count - MT67

[ In Reply To ..]
Also Word counts any line with a paragraph mark, enter, etc., so that will also increase the Word line count, as most places do not pay for "blank lines" so to speak. I think you can use CTRL+0 to remove the spaces to count, but you might want to double check that. You can also turn on your formatting marks to see them easier.

Thanks! I will use the character count, instead! - Helena Handbasket

[ In Reply To ..]

I use File->Properties->Statistics to get character count - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
This may be what you're already using, but in Word going to File, the Properties then the Statistics tab has never led me astray. I divide the characters without spaces by 65 at my job and I'm always able to very closely estimate my paycheck.

My company claims they DO pay for headers/footers, - which is why Im getting suspicious. (n/m)

[ In Reply To ..]

Word count - ICMT

[ In Reply To ..]
I've extensively compared line counts from several companies to the line counts in Word (taking the characters with spaces and dividing by 65, not using their LINE count as that seems to be based on something like a 40-char line).

Across the board, AVERAGING it out, this gives an accurate line count, over several types of reports and several companies.

Word's line count also counts blank lines. - SM Cheryl

[ In Reply To ..]
A single letter or word on a line is counted as a line. When you press Enter twice to start a new paragraph, Word counts the blank line between paragraphs. You can avoid this by modifying your default paragraph style to include "space after" so you only hit the Enter key once. The space after point size can be the same size as the current font in use.

The "characters with spaces count" includes tabs only. Word does not count paragraph marks, line breaks, page breaks, column breaks, section breaks, and hidden text. Word does not count words in text boxes (depending on your version of Word), comments, headers and footers, footnotes and endnotes (unless you tick the box to count this). If you're using the Tracking feature, your count will be wrong because deleted text is still counted. Tables and fields can also mess up the word count. How Word counts for you depends on how complex your document is.

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