Word Count is a tool that allows you to calculate the number of words or text in a document or a
paragraph. Most of the text editors that you are working with will have this pre-installed in them,
however, for this article, we are going to discuss this tool offered by Notepad++. Notepad++ doesn’t
need to have the exact word count tool, but through various options, it can show you the word
count of your paragraph and your document.
Here, we are going to discuss two primary ways of calculating the word count along with discussing
the benefits of possessing such a tool in your arsenal.
When do I need a word count?
Word counts are usually needed when you are writing long paragraphs, which can sometimes reveal
errors in the number of words in your paragraph, especially if you are writing with a strict limit in
mind.
Checking Word Count through Summary
Back in the day, you would have to install a separate plugin just to be able to check the number of
words on Notepad++. However now, you can check it directly through the Summary option. With the
Summary option, you can easily locate the details of the words, lines, characters in your document.
There are some limitations to this tool, for example, it does not show the word count of unselected
words.
Click on “File” and “Open”.
Right after this, click on the “View” option in the menu bar and choose “Summary”. Just by
doing this, you can easily access the word count of your document.
It is also possible for you to check the length and the line option in your word document at
the status bar at the bottom, to show you a summary of the length and the lines in your
document.
Checking Word Count through “Find”
This method is only for showing the word count of the selected words in your document. As
discussed above, the summary option only shows the summary of the word count of your entire
document, but not of selected words. The “Find” feature on your Notepad++ is the option that is
available, that allows you to find the word count of the selected words. There is no requirement for
you to install additional plugins for this and you can do this quite easily, as demonstrated below:
Select your document and click “open”.
Now drag and click from the beginning of the sentence you want to be checked, till the last
point.
Once you have selected the text, you can then click on the “Search” option in the menu bar
and choose the “Find” option.
After this, you will be directed to the “Find what” section and here you have to type “/w+”,
choose ‘Regular Expression’ and ‘In Selection’ will be visible. You will see a “Count” button
right below that. Clicking on that will let you see the total number of selected words.
Here you can keep checking different selections of words, as the Find Window is kept
running.
Character Count
If you would like to understand a little bit more about Character Count, then you should know that it
is a plugin that can easily be installed in Notepad++. The plugin that you can use for this, is the
TextFX plugin. Character counts are more straight-forward and useful. If you are to use Character
count, then it helps the computer by focusing it only on counting characters, in place of reading
entire strings of words.
The first thing that you need to do is select the text that you would like to count. Selecting the text is
important, otherwise the plugin will do the count only for what is selected. To proceed, open the
Menu- TextFX>TextFX Tools>T: Word Count
If you are to do this with the plugin, it is going to display the word count along with the character
count with and without spaces. If you do not select or highlight a particular text, the plugin is bound
to show an error.
This particular plugin can also double up as a paragraph word count tool and to do this, you just have
to select the particular paragraph and use the tool to calculate the word count for the specific
paragraph. To understand the relationship between a character count and a word count, a word, on
average has about 6 characters with spaces or 5 characters without spaces (in Latin). Therefore, if
you would look at a 250 character text, then you would have about 50 words without spaces OR 44
words with spaces.
The benefits of having these tools
Not investing in Character count and Word Count tools would be unwise. This is pure
because it is a part of almost every social media platform that we use and slowly overtaking
almost every other social interaction that comes from a smart-phone. If you have read up a
little about this, you would know that Google and several other search engines have limits to
character counts to decide how search engine results are going to be displayed.
Not everyone does have Microsoft Word. Even if they did, it would be extremely difficult to
wait for the program to open, paste, pray that the text is not formatted or converted, and
then search frantically for the Word Count button and then finally edit the length and the
line of the sentence.
If you are someone who does like to move around and takes their work with them, which
would mean using your iPad, tablet, or any other device to work, then it is awful useful to
have a web-based character and word count tool.
Some useful Tips
If you are doing SEO and have a word count in the average of 2000 words and more, then
having a word count is essential to rank on the first page of Google.
When you are analyzing the work of others, it becomes fairly easy, because you can just
open the site and have a word count in less than 10 seconds.
You also do have an option of using the Chrome Extension Word Counter. If you are visiting
text online, then using this extension can highlight the number of words you want to count.
It can sometimes be a long process but is a less risky one.
If you do your writing on Google Docs, then this is an extremely useful tool to have as you
can just enable this feature in the “tools” section and select the Word, Count.
Conclusion:
We hope that this article was comprehensive and you got more than what you came for. Word
Count and Character Count tools are very useful and can simplify your workload by a considerable
amount, especially while using text editors like Notepad++. Feel free to share how your experience
was while using these tools and be a part of the Notepad++ community to know more about what
you can do with these tools.