Most things, like essays and online articles, have a maximum number of words. But sometimes, like when writing a tweet or a meta description that Google likes, the number of characters is what matters. Find a good word count tool to make sure you don’t go over your limit, whether it’s for one of these reasons or something else.
Microsoft Word is the most popular word processor, and it’s easy to find out how many characters are in a text in Word. But it’s easy to find out how many characters are in a string of text in Google Docs or other word processing programs, even if the option isn’t included by default.
The Character Count Tool in Microsoft Word
Finding out how many words are in a Word document is pretty much the same as finding out how many characters are in it. Find the Words section near the bottom left of the window. This is the best way to do this. This shows a running total of the number of words in your text, but clicking it brings up the Word Count dialogue box. It shows the number of characters in the text, including spaces or not.
You can also use the Review tab and choose Word Count in the Proofing group to get to this tool. This brings up the same conversation, and it’s the same way to get the information you need. Don’t tick the box next to If you don’t want to count footnotes and endnotes in the total number of characters, add them. You can also select a part of the text and follow the same steps to find out how many characters are in that part.
Other Text Editors
Most other word writing programmes come with tools that count the number of characters and the number of words. For example, on Google Docs, click the Tools menu at the top of the screen and then choose Word Count from the list of choices. You can also bring up the conversation right away by hitting Control + Shift + C.
Most word programmes, like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, AbiWord, and WordPerfect, can use the same method. Again, just click Tools and then choose Word Count to see this information on all of these apps.
Online Tools for Counting Characters
Even though character count is usually built into word writing programmes, it isn’t always the case. Notepad and Wordpad, which are the basic word processors that come with Windows, don’t have this feature.
There are many places where you can find out how many characters are in a piece of text. Word Character Count , for example, is a simple website with a big window in the middle where you can put your text. The titles for Characters, Words, Sentences, Paragraphs, and Whitespace are above the text box.
Copy and paste the words you want to count into the space on the website, and then look at the number next to Characters to see how many there are. This is the total number of characters, including spaces. If you want to know how many characters there are without spaces, take the number in the Whitespace field and remove it from this number.
Character count vs. word count
The procedure is exactly the same whether you want a word count or a character count because the word count tool can be accessed in the same way. You don’t need to click anything to see the word count in Microsoft Word because it is clearly shown in the bottom left corner of the screen.
The difference between the two is straightforward: although orange consists of six separate characters, they all work together to make a single word. Similar to this, orange juice only has two words but a total of 12 characters (including the space).
