Anyone ever noticed...

titchard · 20 Mar 2008 at 15:55

That MS Word 2007 (WIN) and MS Word 2008 (OS X) both count words differently...

WIN OFFICE - My Dissertation - 6009
OS X OFFICE - My Dissertation - 5823

Argh!

Nearly as annoying as it decides to change the first letter of some words in the ToC! (In OS X This is)

Rich

theheyes · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:11

Although its a bit weird, its to be expected. Very different pieces of software and one probably counts certain elements and the other doesn't.

JUMPURS · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:21

But a word is a word? And both bits of software are made by the same company so surely the company definition of a word is the same??

SentineL-X · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:29

It's not the definition of a word that's a problem, maybe one includes numbers, headers/footers etc..

titchard · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:29

SentineL-X said:
It's not the definition of a word that's a problem, maybe one includes numbers, headers/footers etc..

But its the same app! I am not comparing Word and Pages - I am comparing MS Word with MS Word!

Rich

skiba · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:36

Count manually to find the differences!

electric ant · 20 Mar 2008 at 16:56

Weird how there is such a difference in the word counts (nearly 200)
Try copying and pasting just the text of the dissertion into a new document and try it again (i.e. exclude contents pages, headers foooters, bilbliography etc)

theheyes · 20 Mar 2008 at 17:37

Even though they share the same name, I'm pretty sure there are entirely different teams working on the software. They don't just bolt on a new front end to the Mac version - it's a very different beast written by different people.

Some word counts are configured to ignore things like 'a' and numbers. Also, is a hyphenated word like "on-site" one word or two?

I've never tried to write a spell checking algorithm but if I were to, these are the things I'd be thinking about.

JUMPURS · 20 Mar 2008 at 20:42

SentineL-X said:
It's not the definition of a word that's a problem, maybe one includes numbers, headers/footers etc..

That would be the 2 office teams having a definition of 'word' though?

theheyes · 20 Mar 2008 at 21:16

JUMPURS said:
That would be the 2 office teams having a definition of 'word' though?

Pretty much, yeah. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it as word counts are approximate anyway by 10-15%.

Are the letter counts the same?