How do I see a live word count in Google Docs?

Open Tools then Word count, tick "Display word count while typing", and press OK. A small box docks to the bottom left and stays there. It survives a reload and follows you into other documents, because the setting belongs to your account rather than to the file.

How do I get the word count of just one paragraph?

Select it first. Both Word and Google Docs switch to counting the selection the moment there is one, and Word shows it as "142 of 2,014 words" in the status bar so you can see both at once. Deselect and the figure goes back to the whole document.

Does the word count include headings, captions and the bibliography?

Yes, all three, in every app on this page. That is the single most common reason a document that reads as 3,000 words is submitted at 3,400. If your brief excludes references, count the body separately by selecting it, or paste the body alone into a counter.

Why does Word count more words than Google Docs on the same document?

Because Word counts text boxes and, if you turn the option on, footnotes and endnotes. Google Docs counts neither. Import a Word document with heavy footnoting into Docs and the figure can drop by several hundred without a word being deleted.

Is there a word count in Google Sheets or Excel?

Not as a menu item. Both have formulas instead. In either one, =LEN(A1) gives characters and =LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A1)," ",""))+1 gives words for a single cell. It is fiddly for a column, which is why most people copy the text out and count it elsewhere.

How do I count words in a PDF?

Open it, select all the text with Ctrl or Cmd + A, copy, and paste it into a counter. There is no word count built into any common PDF reader. Expect the paste to arrive with broken line breaks from the page layout, and expect a scanned PDF to give you nothing at all, because there is no text in it to select.

What is a normal word count for an essay or a blog post?

A university essay is usually briefed at 1,500 to 3,000 words, and the brief is the only number that matters. Blog posts have no rule despite what is often claimed: the length that ranks is whatever the question needs, and padding to hit 2,000 is visible to a reader within two paragraphs.

How to check word count anywhere

The shortcut for every app people ask about, why two of them never quite agree, and what a word count converts to in pages and minutes.

Free toolWord & Character CounterWords, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time, counted as you type.Open the counter

The short answer

In Google Docs press Ctrl + Shift + C, or Cmd + Shift + C on a Mac. In Microsoft Word the count is already in the status bar at the bottom left. Both switch to counting your selection as soon as you have one.

App	Where the count is	Live count?
Google Docs	Tools › Word count, or Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + C	Yes, tick the box in that dialog
Microsoft Word	Status bar, bottom left. Or Review › Word Count	Yes, always on
Google Slides	No word count at all. See below	No
Apple Pages	View › Show Word Count	Yes
Notion	Page menu › Word count. Nothing persistent	No
A PDF	Select all, copy, paste into a counter	No
A web page or email	Select, copy, paste into the word counter	Yes, as you type

Google Docs, in full

The count is behind a menu by default, which is why so many people look for it. Turning it on permanently takes one tick.

Open Tools, then Word count.
Tick Display word count while typing at the bottom of the dialog, then press OK.
A small box appears in the bottom-left corner. Click it to cycle between words, characters, characters without spaces and pages.

The setting is stored against your Google account, not the document, so it follows you into every file you open and survives a reload. On the mobile apps there is no live box: tap the three-dot menu, then Word count, and read it once.

Google Docs counts the body, tables and image captions. It excludes headers, footers and footnotes entirely, and there is no option to include them.

Microsoft Word, in full

Word puts the count in the status bar and leaves it there. If you cannot see it, right-click the status bar and tick Word Count. For the full breakdown, open Review then Word Count, or press Ctrl + Shift + G.

The one setting worth knowing is the checkbox in that dialog: Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes. It is off by default, and a heavily footnoted document can move by hundreds of words when it is switched on. If your marker's number and yours differ by an implausible amount, this is usually why.

Google Slides has no word count

There is no menu item, no add-on that Google ships, and no keyboard shortcut. This catches people out because Docs and Sheets sit next to it and one of them has a count.

The two ways round it:

Copy the outline. Open the speaker-notes view or the filmstrip, select all slides with Ctrl/Cmd + A, copy, and paste into a counter. You get titles and body text but not text inside images.
Download as plain text. File › Download › Plain Text (.txt) gives you the whole deck as text, which is the closest thing to a complete count. Open it and paste it in.

Speaker notes are the part people usually want counted, because that is the script. Paste those on their own and use the speaking-time figure rather than the word count.

Why two counters never quite agree

Word counting looks like it should have one right answer. It does not, and the differences are structural rather than accidental.

Case	Word	Google Docs	Most web counters
Footnotes	Optional	Never	Only if you paste them
Headers and footers	Never	Never	Only if you paste them
Text boxes	Optional	Always	Only if you paste them
A hyphenated compound	One word	One word	Usually one word
A URL	One word	One word	One word
An emoji	Two characters	Two characters	Usually one

The rule that follows from this is simple. Count in the tool that the person setting the limit will use. For an essay that is whatever your institution specifies, for a job application it is the box you are pasting into, and for a post it is the platform's own counter.

Words to pages

A page is not a fixed number of words. The usual convention is 500 words on a single-spaced page and 250 on a double-spaced one, at 12pt with one-inch margins. Font choice moves it further than most people expect: Times New Roman fits noticeably more on a page than Arial at the same size.

Words	Single spaced	Double spaced	Read aloud
250	½ page	1 page	About 2 minutes
500	1 page	2 pages	About 4 minutes
1,000	2 pages	4 pages	About 8 minutes
1,500	3 pages	6 pages	About 12 minutes
2,000	4 pages	8 pages	About 15 minutes
3,000	6 pages	12 pages	About 23 minutes
5,000	10 pages	20 pages	About 38 minutes

The read-aloud column uses 130 words a minute, which is the pace of a prepared talk. Silent reading is about 238 words a minute, so a 2,000-word article takes roughly eight minutes to read and fifteen to say.

Counting from the command line

If the text is already in a file, the shell has counted it since 1971. wc takes a flag per unit:

Command	What you get
`wc -w essay.txt`	Words
`wc -m essay.txt`	Characters
`wc -l essay.txt`	Lines

Two things to know before you trust the number. wc -c counts bytes, not characters, so any accented or non-Latin text will overcount: use -m. And wc counts markup, so running it on a Markdown or HTML file counts every tag and every hash as words. It is exact for plain prose and misleading for anything else.

When you want the count while you write

Everything above is a count taken after the fact. The more useful version is a figure that moves as you type, especially against a limit you have to land inside.

That is what the word and character counter is for. Paste the text, pick the limit you are writing to, and the bar shows what is left. It gives you the eight figures in one view: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time, speaking time and pages. Nothing is uploaded, which matters more than it sounds when the text is a draft contract or unpublished work.