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.

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