Question

How to not include some words in a word count ?, Word 2007

Asked by: mrd156

## Sorry I don't know how this ended up in Anti Virus, can't remove it, it is a Word 2007 question. ##

Ok I thought this would be really easy for the likes of Office 2007, but it looks not.
My girlfriend and I, are doing lots of assignments for Uni and would like to use the word count feature. The problem we have with this is we have been told the references, i.e. (John Smith, Some book, some page) are not included. With my girlfriend using lots of references and getting to her max word limit, OMG this is a problem. This has meant a print out and a manual word count to give the correct word count.

I though it would nice and easy select the words that you don't want to include right click, word count, don't include, then you would open the word count utility and it would highlight the words you have not included or something.

Anyone know of an add-in that would help, because it does not look possible in word how it is.

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Asked On
2009-11-08 at 08:42:39ID24881699
Tags

Microsoft Office

,

Word 2007

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Anti-Virus

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Microsoft Word

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Answers

 

by: GrahamSkanPosted on 2009-11-08 at 09:32:47ID: 25771106

You could do it without VBA, but with some arithmetic.
You can count the number of occurrences of each excluded word with Find and Replace and subtract them form the total.

Open the dialogue with Ctrl+H, and click the 'More' button so that you can tick the 'Find whole words only' checkbox. Specify the same word for the Find and Replace and you will get a report of the number of replacements at the end of each replacement process.

 

by: GrahamSkanPosted on 2009-11-08 at 09:53:09ID: 25771187

This macro shows how to do it with VBA.

Sub AcceptableWordCount()
    Dim ExcludedWords As Variant
    Dim WordCount As Long
    Dim i As Integer
    
    ExcludedWords = Array("John", "Smith", "Some", "book", "page")
    WordCount = ActiveDocument.Range.Words.Count
    For i = 0 To UBound(ExcludedWords)
        With ActiveDocument.Range.Find
            .MatchWholeWord = True
            .Text = ExcludedWords(i)
            Do While .Execute
                WordCount = WordCount - 1
            Loop
        End With
    Next i
    MsgBox "Word Count:" & WordCount
End Sub
                                              
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by: moorhouselondonPosted on 2009-11-08 at 10:21:23ID: 25771274

Is she using the References facility of Word to enter the references, where it should generate the Superscript automatically, and puts the cross-reference at the bottom?

 

by: EricFletcherPosted on 2009-11-09 at 07:15:30ID: 25776570

You can do this quite easily if you use styles.

Set up one or more character styles that you can apply to the references (and/or other items) to be excluded from the count. For example, I typically have a style named "Citation", and apply it to citations noted within text as in "blah blah (Smith et al. 2004), blah blah". For editing and review, the Citation style is set in a bright color so we can see it and cross-check against the bibliography.

For your purposes though, you can use this to take advantage of a poorly documented feature of Word's word count function: the count ignores hidden text.

So, if you temporarily redefine the Citation style so the font attribute is "hidden", the word count will exclude all Citation-tagged content. You could set up a macro to toggle the style definition to make it easier to switch the visibility on an off. Note that hidden text is excluded from the word count even if it is visible but set with the dotted underline in the Show All view.

Incidentally, there are other advantages of this approach for research papers and formally cited documents: typically, any citation needs to accurately match a bibliographic reference -- a task both tedious and error-prone during editing and/or proofreading. Having them stand out in color helps, but it also lets you pull them all (use Find All on the Citation style, then copy and paste to get the extracted list of all entries). You can then sort these into the bibliography and get the citations and references pretty close to one another for proofing. [In my example above, I would remove the leading "(" from the extracted Citation items so "Smith et al. 2004") would sort with the related "Smith et al." reference.]

 

by: mrd156Posted on 2009-11-10 at 12:35:22ID: 31651563

Thank you to everyone, all good answers but the the vote goes to my gf, because she will be using it mostly.

Thanks again

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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