Bug in Word: Word Count

sam_passmore
When writing a word document with Zotero built citations, I get an inflated word count when looking at the number of words in a highlighted subset.

To reproduce:
1. Write a few sentences with a zoetero citation
2. Highlight the sentence, excluding the citation & check word count
3. Highlight the sentence, including the citation & check word count

I often find in step 3, I get a word count of 300+ though the sentence will be around 30 words.

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

  • DWL-SDCA
    Word is counting fields (the stuff Zotero inserts to mark the citation) as though they are words to be counted. Although, hidded field markers shouldnt be counted as words; Microsoft has done this for years. I'm not sure why but it seems to have been a concious choice. I can see counting names and numbers of visible authors and dates but not all of the hidded things for a numbered style.

    The way I deal with this is to only count words after I've finished the document and removed field codes. I hope that there is a better way to accomplish this but I don't think so.
  • bwiernik
    Microsoft did finally fix this in Word 2016 (at least in the current version of Office 365), so you could update your word processor to fix it.
Sign In or Register to comment.