How to Do a Word Count in Microsoft Word for Office 365 (An Easy 4 Step Guide)

It’s common for writing assignments to include some type of word count. This helps to ensure that the document is at a minimum length, which should help it to cover the topic properly. Fortunately, you can learn how to do a word count in Microsoft Word for Office 365.

How to Count the Number of Word in an MS Word Document

1. Open the document.
2. Select the Review tab.
3. Click the Word Count button.
4. Find the number next to Words.

Our guide continues below with additional information on how to do a word count in Microsoft Word, including pictures of these steps.

Sometimes when you are writing a document in Microsoft Word you will need to hit a certain word count. Whether this is for an assignment at school or for a document that you are submitting to a publisher, word counts are pretty common.

But manually counting the words in a document is slow, tedious, and very frustrating. Luckily Microsoft Word has a tool that can do this count for you quickly and accurately. Our guide below will show you where to find it.

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How to Get a Document Word Count in Microsoft Word (guide with Pictures)

The steps in this article were performed in Microsoft Word for Office 365, but will work in versions of Word from 2007 and up.

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Step 1: Open the document in Microsoft Word.

Step 2: Select the Review tab at the top of the window.

Step 3: Click the Word Count button in the Proofing section of the ribbon.

Step 4: Locate the word count to the right of Words on the window that appears at the center of the screen.

Note that the word count can also be found in the horizontal gray bar at the bottom of the Word window.

Our tutorial continues below with additional discussion about how to do a word count in Microsoft Word. You can also check out our guide on how to get character count in Word for more information.

More Information on the Word Count Tool in Microsoft Word

While the steps above take you to the Word Count button via the navigational ribbon, you can also see a word count in the status bar at the bottom of the window.

If you click the word count there it will also open the Word Count window seen in the guide above.

Some of the other information that you will see on this screen includes:

• Page count
• Word count
• Character count without spaces
• Character count with spaces
• The number of paragraphs in the document
• The number of lines in the document

You can also choose whether or not to include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes in these counts.

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