Word counter in Word 2007
A lot of people, particularly journalists who write articles for a living, ask me whether we can put a word counter into the mini-bar for them. Better than that, we have put a word counter into the Word status bar. This displays the number of words in the document all the time and if you select a block of text, it will count the words for you too, showing selected/total.
Comments
Anonymous
March 20, 2006
I think that at least on the Mac version (Office 2004) the wordcount eats up a <i>ton</i> of CPU - like, 10% when nothing at all is happening and the document/app is in the background without focus.
It's one of those things which is nice, but unnecessary. More useful is to bind a key combination to the word count feature.
Why?
1) you don't need to know your wordcount <i>every moment</i>. Just when you need to know your wordcount, which will happen sporadically. For the rest, you want some time to think.
2) visual clutter
3) CPU usage updating this tiny little thing on the status bar which is actually an on-demand requirement, not a permanent requirement. (By contrast, the name of the document is a permanent requirement. That's why it's in the title bar, I think we can agree.)
Consider that you don't have a clock showing how long you've been working on the document either. Why not? Because it's not the most important thing to show people. (In fact it's not important at all, unless you were writing software for people sitting timed exams.) The absolute wordcount matters to few people.
So while this may, on the face of it, seem nifty and clever and have won its programmers some kudos, it's actually not as useful as it seems.Anonymous
March 20, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
March 20, 2006
Hi Darren..
1) yes, I'm sure people tell you they want this. I can see that I can want it. But questions to be considered are: should it be on by default? And can it be done better some other way? Giving users everything they want leads to giant flashing blue globs and other rubbish. Users aren't designers..
2) you don't have to directly notice clutter for it to affect you. That's the really subtle thing about visual clutter. When there's a lot you think there's none. It's only when you have none that you realise the difference.
3) it's certainly the figure I've seen (for the Microsoft daemon) though I'm on the Mac, where different rules may apply.
I meant programmer kudos in the sense that someone shows it and says "this only took two lines of code, ya know".
Things I like about Office? I find it really compatible on the whole with Microsoft formats. Not all of them, as I've blogged today.. but most.Anonymous
March 20, 2006
so is your main issue with this feature that its on by default? I'm interested in your suggestions because its not too late for us to change things. If you were designing this feature, in response to customer demand, how would you like us to deliver it in the UI? I do agree on the clutter point you see. I'm not sure where you're coming from on the blue globs though (where are we proposing to do that?) and I just think you are off the mark on the kudos point. Of course I accept you aren't a designer but blogging is about conversation and about learning. How would you do this? Anyone else care to add an opinion too?Anonymous
May 04, 2006
I'm out in New York at the moment with some press and finally got the answer on the word count question.&nbsp;...Anonymous
May 04, 2006
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