Microsoft Word Bug – Character Count Is Wrong

Seems to be a trend by the Microsoft Word Dev Team, similarly to the Word count being incorrect

Microsoft Word Bug - Words Count Is Wrong

While working on my recent article I also developed a Word automation function to utilize Microsoft Word’s built-in word count. I figured it might have been the easiest solution to getting a quick and reliable word count from any string. Boy was I wrong.

in my testing, so is the character count!

So, while developing Word automation functions to perform a character count of a string:

How To Count The Number Of Characters In A String

Ever needed to get the character count of a string? Easy enough, right! Simply use the Len() function. lLength = Len("My string to get the character count of.") But what happens if you want the character count, but ignoring one or more characters? What if you don’t want to count “spaces”, or perhaps punctuation? What do you do then?

I was dumbfounded by the fact that Word would return incorrect count values.

Depending on the approach taken, I was either getting the number of characters minus things like spaces, or on the other hand it wouldn’t count hidden characters such as returns, etc… In all cases, I never got the correct value except for very straightforward cases of a single string. The minute I’d get into paragraphs … things fell apart.

For reference, I tried things like:

.Characters.Count

.ComputeStatistics(wdStatisticCharacters)

Not counting spaces… makes no sense. Even worse is not allowing for an option/argument to enable us to get the raw character count vs whatever the heck Microsoft currently has setup!

So like for counting the number of characters in a string, do not rely in any shape or form on Microsoft Word to provide you with an accurate character count. Instead, refer to my article (link provided above) for methods that work properly.