There are very few people who write without a word count in mind.
If you’re professional freelance writer, you’ll be given a word limit for a piece of writing. More often than not, you’ll be paid according to the word count of a piece.
If you’re a submitting a novel manuscript, it’s essential that it’s at least 50,000 words. So, you’ve to monitor your word count, to ensure it doesn’t fall short of the prescribed target.
Similarly, if you’re writing an blog post and you want it to be more than 1000 words to rank well in the search engines, you would want to keep a watch on your word count.
Also, if you’re a writer, who as a self-challenge, sets a daily quota of words, keeping an eye on your word count matters.
If you use Google Docs to type your work, you can easily monitor word count with these few steps.
The word count in Google Docs feature, just like many other useful ones, is often overlooked. But once you start using it, you’ll be a more efficient writer when it comes to handling word count.
Contents
How to Check Word Count on Google Docs Shortcut
Here’s the Google Docs word count shortcut.
With your document open press the CTRL + Shift + C keys together. Your word count will be displayed.
If you’ve trouble remembering this shortcut to check word count on Google Docs shortcut, use the steps below.
With your document open in Google Docs, click on the Tool Menu.
When you click on word count, a small window pops up showing you the following details.
You can see that the number of words in the document are counted.
If you’re often checking your word count, you can do it much faster using the keyboard shortcut – Ctrl + Shift + C . It won’t be long before you get the hang of it.
Google Docs Word Count on a Selection of Text
Say you just want Google Docs to check the word count on a selection of text. This may happen if you’ve notes or outlines in the document itself to help you with the writing. You don’t want them to be included in the word count.
In this instance, you would just have to select the portion of the text, click on the Tools menu and choose Word count.
When you click on the word, the word count for the selected text will be displayed. Also displayed will be the total number of words in the document.
This feature is useful if you want to check the number of words in a particular section. Suppose don’t want an intro to be three paragraphs and not more than 100 words. You can easily check the word count this way.
How to Put a Word Count on Google Docs
Do you want to put a word count on Google Docs so that you can monitor it as you type?
This is a useful feature if you like to see the number of words as you type. It gives you a motivation boost as you can see the number of words increasing
This is how to make word count show on Google Docs.
Again go to the Tools menu and select word count to insert a word count in Google Docs.
When the word count box apears click on Display word count while typing and then click OK.
As soon as you do that, the word count of the document will be inserted and displayed on the left panel.
You can also see the word count of a particular portion of the text. Just highlight the portion and the word count will be displayed.
You can remove the word count counter by clicking on the drop down arrow as shown below. Then click on Hide word count.
That’s how you make word count show or hide it on Google Docs.
Live Word Count Counter Doesn’t Work for Long Document
The counter is going to show up only for a certain number of words. In our case it was 3838 words.
Typing beyond that we were prompted to view word count.
You’ll be returned to the Word count box to view the number of words you’ve managed.
This will be a disappointment for those who work on book-length manuscripts. However, the limitation will not bother the rest of us who write not more than a few thousand words at any one time.
What is Not Included in the Word Count Feature
Not everything you type into Google Docs will be counted as words. The following are not recognized as words.
Whatever you write in the footer and header sections will not count as words. Even if you highlight them during the word-counting process.
Footnotes are also excluded.
Symbols and special characters like #, ?, & and * are excluded as words but are counted as characters as shown below.
Now that you know how to view word count on Google Docs, you won’t have to play the guessing game when it comes to the number of words you’ve typed at any one time.
