If you are new to Google Docs and would like to know-how to display the word count for a document, page or selection of text. This quick guide will show you how you can easily view a word count when typing or when finished. Using either the official Google Doc application for phones or tablets or within the Chrome browser on your computer or laptop.
Sometimes writing assignments need to reach a particular word count and being able to monitor this as you write can assist in creating the perfect article. Google provides access to its Google Docs app on a wide variety of different devices from Android to iOS and whether you are a student writing a dissertation, an assignment for school, a report for your company or writing articles for pleasure, monitoring the word count of your document is easy.
On phones and tablets
To view the word count of your document in the Google Doc application, simply follow these quick instructions. They apply to both the iOS and Android version of the app.
1. With the document you would like to check the word count on open, select the “…” in upper right-hand corner of the app and simply select “Word Count”. This will display the words, characters and characters excluding spaces.
It is also worth noting that a word count in Google Docs does not include content in footer notes, footers, or headers. The word count will also not include symbols that are used throughout the article, such as greater or smaller or × for example. However, it will count dashes used to hyphenate words. So it will also include words that are found in long URLs which might be included in your document, for example, https://www.this-is a-domain-name.com/document-name.txt or similar.
Word counts also provide a handy way for you to estimate reading time, maybe for a presentation or simply to know-how long your readers will visit your website. Depending on the number of words in your article on average reader will read approximately 200 to 300 words per minute. Meaning a 2,000 word document should take around 8 minutes for an average reader to complete, depending on its content, of course.
Also, unless you select certain areas or lines within your document, the app will count everything except the areas we have mentioned above. Word count is only available in the Google Docs app and not others supplied free by Google. Although most other word processing software such as Word, Notes and other note-taking applications available for phones, tablets and computers provide ways to view word count. To find your word count for longer documents on your computer :
Google Docs in a browser or on a computer
1. Open the document you would like to check
2. At the top of the page, click “Tools > Word count” to reveal the documents total
3. Once you have finished, simply close the results by clicking “Done”.
Word count shortcut
If you are using Google Docs on a laptop with the Google Chrome browser, you can use a handy shortcut by :
1. Simply pressing “Command + Shift + C” on Apple computers or “Ctrl + Shift + C” on Windows computers.
Show word count as you type
Another handy feature is the ability to count the number of words as you type. To enable this :
1. Once again go to “Tools > Word count”
2. Check the box at the bottom of the window labelled “Display word count while typing”.
As you type, the total number of words in the document will be shown in the bottom left corner of your browser window. Next to this is a small drop-down arrow which when pressed will reveal : How many pages are included in your document, the number of words, the number of characters, the number of characters excluding spaces and the option to hide the word count once again if desired.
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