Word Counts - Openoffice or Microsoft Word?

If the official counter counts hyphenated words as one, save a new copy of your file and search-and-replace the hyphens with spaces.

My 602PC unfortunately counts those words as two. Doesn't make an extreme difference in my case, but anything seemingly worrisome will worry me at this point.

In the Arctic there is no milk.

Moving this to Tech help.

The official word counter will hopefully be available before the 25th. (It was last year.)

It counts the spaces between words to determine word count, so hyphenated, unspaced words are counted as one.

I believe most people were pretty close with word. Let me check my records about Open Office...

Hmm, I didn't save my comparisons. But here's my count comparison from 2006:

RoughDraft: 46416 (.rtf)
Word: 46438 (.doc)
NaNoWriMo Robots: 46420 (.txt)

Write a couple hundred just to be safe, but you should get a chance to check before the deadline (the 25th at the latest.) Any time you get a word count discrepancy, it's best to go with the one that's the lowest... lowball it, and you might be pleasantly suprised when you hit "validate".

--
Heather Dudley
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I have noticed a bug in OpenOffice 3, where it's counting a word with a leading quotation mark as two words. For example:

This is a test.
"This is a test."

The first line it reports as 4 words, while the second line is reported as 5 words.

I don't know if that's something everyone is affected by or if it exists on previous versions of OOO though. Incidentally though . . . OOO3 reports hyphenated words as a single word for me.

Hope this helps shed some light on something for someone lol.

//Edit: I discovered the miscount is due to the custom quotes it automatically replaces normal quotes with. You can turn them off by going to Tools > AutoCorrect, on the Options tab uncheck "Replace standard quotes with custom quotes" (second from the bottom, and on the "Custom Quotes" tab, uncheck both "Replace" options. Then do a find and replace to fix any existing quotation marks. After that it counts words correctly.

Just a comment about the words themselves (regardless of word counting software)

Words with hyphens are actually a combined word so should count as one.

the phrase "er...well" should have at least a space after the ellipses, if not before as well. (so "er ... well")

disregarding this, I usually aim for 100 more words than the total required and with google docs last year, lost very few words and did not have to replace hyphens with spaces (which can be dangerous if you use the "n-dash" "-" as punctuation.)

Yvette (ML - CPT Region)

I would *definitely* shoot for over the 50,000 mark by at least a few hundred. Right now, according to Open Office, my story has 30,571 words. According to Google Docs, it's 31,219. That's quite a difference! (Don't have Word to compare it with, but I imagine I'd get a different number there, too.) If you go over, yay you and no big deal, but you certainly don't want to come in under, thinking all the while that you'd made it.

13412 with Google Docs and 13561 with my way too optimistic software. Could have been worse, I suppose.

In the Arctic there is no milk.

I have found Microsoft Word's count to be very close to the nanowrimo counter. The biggest difference has been due to formatting errors (on my part), if I forgot to put a space after an elipsis (its supposed to be followed by a space) or if I forgot the space after an endash.

NaNo 2006(win): "Children of the Stars"
NaNo 2007(win): "Darkness Falls"
NaNo 2008(win): "Dark Storm Rising"

I had issues with Open Office 3 and the word count. I have corrected it so that my count is closer to that of the official counter, but it's just so depressing to lose almost 1000 words to it.
(even if I knew it was really overestimating)

It's an OpenOffice bug... http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=89042

*sigh*

http://www.enderra.com/blog/

Thanks for the OpenOffice bug heads-up--I just lost ~400 words out of 21K. I was having a bad enough writing week as it was... :-(

--Phil.

I don't really use the forums - came here via google! - and having exactly the same problem with open office 3 (the only word processing software on the laptop I'm using at home) and word (on the work computer). Mine's already at a difference of 1200 which is way past my comfort level - spent part of my lunch writing and when I updated my word count? I had actually gone backward from my last update! As has been said already, incredibly disheartening, especially when you're already behind.

Good luck with it - I hope it doesn't throw you too far out on your count , but if it helps any you're not the only one (not the only one fed up with open office either, I always knew I periodically hated word, but I didn't realise how much I secretly love it!)

Again, aside from the open office bug, which I think has a workaround to correct the way that OpenOffice counts the quotes, the largest part of your word count difference will be due to formatting. Be sure to look for any commas, elipses, endashes, etc. that don't have a space after them and add the space. Also, if you are counting on footnotes or things of that nature, copy/paste won't usually pick those up, so you'd need to save the word processor file as a text file, then copy/paste the contents of the text file into the Validator. 1200 words is too big to be just random differences -- it is likely to be either the OpenOffice bug or formatting issues (or both).

NaNo 2006(win): "Children of the Stars"
NaNo 2007(win): "Darkness Falls"
NaNo 2008(win): "Dark Storm Rising"

Damn. That explains why I'm off by 1100+ words. I love Open Office for every other reason... argh. At least we have the long weekend to over-compensate!