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Select "editing" if it’s not already selected. There you'll find a drop-down box that indicates whether you're "editing", "suggesting", or "viewing". If necessary, you can change to editing mode by going to the right side of the toolbar. First, your document needs to be in editing mode. On a desktop/laptop, you can open the Google Docs' word counter using either the mouse or a keyboard shortcut.
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Depending on whether you're using a Mac or PC, or desktop, tablet or smartphone, there are a couple of different ways to open the word counter.
#Word counter google doc how to#
Whatever your reason for needing to count the words in your Google Doc, here’s a breakdown of how to do it. In fact, social media is all about character count, making the word count feature (which includes character count) an important tool when composing things like article headlines, professional titles on LinkedIn, profile bios on Instagram, Twitter posts, SMS messages and more.
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Compose blog posts, text messages or Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat posts to publish later-paying close attention to the character count. Famous authors often did the same Ernest Hemingway = 500 / day, Barbara Kingsolver = 1,000 / day, Stephen King = 2,000 / day, Anne Rice = 3,000 / day.Īlthough not as feature rich as a desktop application, you can also create a Google Doc on your smartphone or tablet and edit documents on the go. If you're committing to write a certain number of words per day.Letters of recommendation and cover letters also follow a word count standard. If you're writing an essay for a job application that requires a minimum and maximum word count.If you're a professional making a slide presentation and want to stay within a certain word limit- not too many to overwhelm the audience but enough to pass on the essential information.If you’re a student writing a five-page paper but you haven’t formatted your document yet, word count can tell you how close you are to being finished.There are a lot of reasons you might want to find the word/character counts for a written work, including: Learning how to use the word counter in Google Docs will make your writing process faster.
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