The Case of the Missing Section Word Count
Need an automated way of getting a word count for each section of a Microsoft Word document? A word count for each chapter of your novel? Read on.
Sometimes I find myself writing about the big stuff. Communication. Learning. Psychology. Life. This is not one of those times. Today I’m writing about the small stuff. How to get a [bleep] word count for chapters in a [bleep] Microsoft [bleep] Word document. On the upside, the small stuff usually turns out more useful in the end.
As you may be able to tell, this drove me nuts for years. MS Word will not tell you how many words are in each of the individual sections of a document. You have to highlight the text that you want counting, and select the appropriate command from the menu. A real pain if you have 30+ chapters and you are trying to achieve a read-load balance across them. The solution I’ve developed, and which I present here, is a little cumbersome to enact in the first instance but works well thereafter.
This is an unusual post for me to construct. It’s a ‘how to do something’ thing. For that reason, I am going to write in mainly bulleted form, for the sake of clarity. My aim is that you should be able to follow the steps that I set out and end up with an actual…
