In the past, I’ve always done my writing in Microsoft Word. This goes all the way back to Word 6.0 on my Mac LC when I was at University thirty years ago. I pay for Microsoft 365, which not only includes Office (and so Word) but also comes with 1TB of cloud storage, which I think isn’t a bad deal. I have the family edition, shared with my wife, two kids, my parents and my wife’s parents. For less than £100 a year. Really not a bad deal at all.
But I’ve been writing A Healing Love mostly in Google Docs rather than Word. I have my reasons and I won’t go into them here, but it’s something I’ve essentially been “forced” to do.
I don’t particularly like Docs. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the desktop version of Word in terms of features and it’s “save after every keystroke” advantage is negated by the desktop version of Word if your file is saved in your OneDrive.
But I found out something else recently that’s put me off Docs even more.
It counts words in a document differently to Word.
Seriously. You’d think that counting words would be easy—you just count the words. But apparently not. Word and Docs use different methods and treat different things as “words” so you end up with different word counts. Sometimes wildly different.
Now, for me, that’s not really that big of a deal. But it is annoying. I have a spreadsheet with the word count of each chapter of everything I’ve written in it, and I’ve been keeping track of the word count of A Healing Love with Docs—but all my other work I did counts for in Word, so that means my comparison with other books is inaccurate. I’ve had to go back and redo the count for each chapter in Word.
Annoying, but nothing more.
But if you’re, for example, a student with a strict word count for an assignment, or a journalist/columnist writing to a word count or entering a fiction writing contest with a word count—yeah, it would be annoying to think you’re just on the limit having written in one only to find the other says your over and your submission gets thrown out.
There are some very good explanations of the different methods used bny Docs and Word for counting words. They are fascinating. But you’d think that in 2024, with all the things that corporations could use to set their products apart from the others, they’d at least agree on a method for counting words so that any confusion is avoided.
