Hi Pop,

The word count in the Tools Word Count dialog is accurate according
what you would expect -- a "word" is a sequence of letters or digits
delimited by spaces, tabs, or punctuation.

What you may be thinking of is that in a macro, the value of
ActiveDocument.Words.Count is usually much higher. That's because the
..Words collection in VBA counts each paragraph mark and each
punctuation character as a "word" -- which has been causing untold
grief for programmers for many years and is totally inexcusable.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:35:32 -0400, "PopS"
wrote:

However, the word count is not an actual count of the words,
right? It seems I read somewhere that it's only an estimate,
albeit fairly close but I don't recall any % accuracy figures.

Or am I all wet?

Pop

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
: Word counts the actual number of lines in the document, not
some calculated
: result based on the number of characters.
:
: --
: Suzanne S. Barnhill
: Microsoft MVP (Word)
: Words into Type
: Fairhope, Alabama USA
: Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
: Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so
: all may benefit.
:
: "Joann" wrote in message
: news : I use Word Count to get character and line counts for my
business. I need
: to
: know what characters Word counts in a file, and how Word
defines a
: character,
: line and word. Also, I use the Tools/ Word Count, and it
shows number of
: characters, words and lines. However, if I divide the number
of
: characters
: by 65, (the average size of a line of typing) the result I
get is a much
: lower number of lines that what Word Count shows as the
'lines'. This is
: very confusing.
: