When counting words, Word 2003 counts periods and dashes as word separators. Is there a setting that would change this, so that only spaces would be counted as word separators?
This is in a commercial setting, we want to count phone numbers with hyphens or periods between the sections as one word, and Word is counting them as 3 words.
I’ve looked in Word Help, and I’ve googled, and I haven’t found anything. We don’t have the option of upgrading, and we don’t have the option of leaving out the separators.
That won’t work - the OP wants phone numbers to count as one word, this would confirm the bug that counts them as three.
I’ve many times used placeholders to get around such limitations. Write a macro that replaces all instances of [character].[character] with [character]XQX[character]. Write another that replaces all dashes with ZQZ. (Or, if appropriate, all cases of [character]-[character] with [character]ZQZ[character].)
You can either do this, count, and revert, as **sailor **suggested, or write a contrary macro that undoes the above changes. Test the hell out of it.
I appreciate these workarounds but in this particular application I don’t think that kind of approach will work.
Here’s the sitch: this is for ad publication. We charge for bold type by the word. We have an online self-service application where people put in their ads; this application uses InDesign for the ad composition (overkill, but that’s what they use). InDesign does not count periods or hyphens as word separators, so it counts a phone number as one word; the self-service application also calculates the cost of the ad, so that a bold phone number costs (say) $1.
The ad is then imported into our system that uses Word for ad composition, where a phone number is counted as three words. Our system re-builds the ad, using text and XML data from the self-service application, but applying its own internal rules. It then re-calculates the cost of the ad, and a bold phone number costs $3.
We have been able to tweak all the other settings between the two systems so that costs match; this is the only holdout. We have been told by our self-service vendor that InDesign does not have the option of changing its settings for word count, which is why I am looking at the Word settings. I don’t care which way it goes, $1 or $3 is all the same to me, we just want them to match. The trouble caused by not matching is far more costly than the possible $2 loss.
To save you the trouble, we recognize this is not a good way to handle self-service ad publication, and it will change eventually, but that could be months down the road. In the meantime our Finance department is mandating that this be fixed, and they have the ear of the publisher.
Roddy
eta: it occurs to me that it might be worth it to stop charging for bold altogether. It’s not like the old lead-type days when bold actually cost more money to print than regular type. If we can’t get this to reconcile, I think that will be my suggestion to management.
