How do you get a word and character count of a document in Pages for Mavericks

With a doc open, go to 'Insert' and scroll down to 'Word Count'. From the small word count panel that appears in the bottom of the document, you can also select character count. What you can't do is to have the lower status bar showing with all the information you need, inckudingn the page count. As an author, I find Pages 5 worse than useless, for that reason. Anyway, I reverted to Pages 4.3 - it was easy to do. If you want to do that, the first thing is to check that Pages 4.3 is still in your system - right click on a doc, select 'Open with...' and if 'Pages 4.3' shows all is well!

Next, open Pages 5 and with it open, rename it, ignoring the warning. The all your docs will revert to Pages 4.3, which is a much better words processor altogether, in my opinion.

Terence

I have to admit, I'm curious. Why do writers need to know word and character counts? I know they paid by the word back in the pulp days; is that still the case?

Is the character count important for writers who Tweet professionally?

When writing books, it helps to keep the number of pages in a chapter within certain limits - word count doesn't do that, because the number of pages is affected by layout (bullets, tables, etc.). When a chapter is too long, many readers start to skim read and might miss important information. I write mainly psychology and psychotherapy texts and it's important that I keep my readers interested! Also, I sometimes get asked for, say, 500 words on a particular subject and at other times, for a certain number of pages for a journal.

Anyway, Pages 4.3 works perfectly for the professional!

I agree. I just installed Pages 5.1, but fortunately had Pages 4.3 on my back-up and reverted to that. It doesn't look like you can do a word count that includes or excludes footnotes with 5.1. It's no good for academic work, and enough to give you a minor panic attack when you've got a deadline to meet. Apple should've mentioned this when explaining what the update includes. I've left feedback for them.

Hi jonathan,

I struggled with this one as well, as i'm finishing up a PhD thesis and word counts are incredibly important. Through trial and error i found out that words like 'e.g.' and 'i.e.' count as two words and an ampersand (&) doesn't count at all. That being said, i didn't like the fact that the word count always included footnotes and i was dismayed that i couldn't get an accurate count of words in the main body of my text. That all disappeared yesterday when, by chance, while i was copying a completed chapter and pasting it into my main document, i discovered that Pages can indeed give you an accurate word count excluding the footnotes! Here's all you need to do:

1. In pages 5.2, make sure that the Word Count function is first enabled by selecting View --> Show Word Count from the Pages Menu Bar. (If it's already enabled, it will read View --> Hide Word Count, so if that's what it says, then no need to do anything.)

2. Once enabled, check the Word count that's currently showing at the bottom of the page. That's the word count including your footnotes.

2. Now, place your cursor anywhere within the current document, then hit command+A (for Select All).

3. Viola! Your word count now shows the actual number of words within the body of the text only, excluding footnotes!

Hope that helps!

Is there a way of getting the word count without titles and headings too?

Not that i'm aware of...

Pages v5.2.2 will give you the word count of any selected text, providing you have View > Show Word Count enabled, and Word Count selected in the floating panel at the document bottom. Therefore, it is easy to ascertain the word count for just footnotes, selected document body content, or single pages — additional to the total document word count.

Yes, but this doesn't let you get a total word count for an entire document without titles and headings (as 'rishtag' has asked above). For academic writing, it's important to be able to get accurate word counts (which Pages can do), but we often need total word counts without footnotes, titles, headings, added quotes, etc.). Pages can easily give a total word count without the footnotes (as i've mentioned above) all in word quick keyboard command, but cannot also subtract Chapter headings, titles, added quotes word counts from the total.

So unless you go through an entire document and only select the text you'd like counted you can't get the count as 'rishtag' has asked. It would be too time consuming for those of us writing theses, dissertations, books and the like to go through a 400-page text, for example, and only select the text we'd like Pages to count words for. This might work well for shorter documents though.