Word X: Unpredictable word counter

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
May 26th, 2003 • 1:27 am

When working on big Word documents, I like to monitor my progress, and Word’s live word counter fits that purpose (more or less) by constantly updating the total number of words and my current position in the document.

Today, I’m working on a big document, and Word’s word counter simply doesn’t work. It gets updated when I first open the document, but after I’ve worked on the document for a while, it just stops getting updated. It no longer changes.

In the picture below, I’m forever stuck at 9544 words out of 21496. I keep typing, but the numbers don’t change anymore.

A picture named WordCounter.jpg

The only way to get it working again is to go to Word’s preferences dialog, disable the “Live Word Count” option, and then re-enable it. But then it ceases to work again after a while.

Of course, if I tried to report the problem to Microsoft or the MVP-monitored Microsoft newsgroups, they’d probably blame it on a “corrupted document”, as if the corruption itself was not Word’s fault.

Oh well.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.